Appendix # 1: Bul: A Mayan Game of Chance
http://www.halfmoon.org/bul.html
(image 05.02.05.01 available in print form)
Play BUL, A Mayan Game of Chance
Games of chance were quite popular in a number of Mesoamerican cultures; the Aztecs' addiction to the game of Patolli is well known. Fra Diego Duran wrote that the stakes they played for sometimes rose so high that the loser lost not only his wealth but his freedom too, selling himself into slavery to pay his debt. (One should keep in mind that Father Duran may have been prejudiced; he fiercely disapproved of Patolli because the players invoked the names of Aztec gods during the game).
Similar games were played by the classic Maya. "Game boards" have been found scratched into the stone of building floors and the bases of stelae. It isn't known if they used these games to gamble like the Aztecs, or for the simple pleasure of playing. The Mayan game of Bul is a relative of the Aztec Patolli, with which it shares many common features. In Bul, a "board" was made by placing 15 grains of corn in a row, the 14 spaces between grains being used for play. Four flat grains of corn with a black mark burned into one side served as dice. When the grains were tossed the count was based on the number that fell with the burned side up (1 burned side and 3 unburned = 1, etc.). But if all the kernels came up blank, the count was 5.
Bul can be played with any even number of participants. The example used here is the simplest arrangement, with only 2 players. Each player has 5 game pieces; these could be any readily available item: seeds, sticks, bits of cloth, etc. I've represented the pieces as warriors because the language the Maya used while playing Bul seems to have been a metaphor for warfare: game pieces were described as being taken captive or killed.
Opposing players each start with a single game piece at opposite ends of the board; each gets two throws of the corn in a row, advancing his marker the number of spaces indicated after each throw. When a game piece reaches the opposite end of the board, it is re-entered at the end it where it started, as if the board were circular.
The real point was to land on a space already occupied by your opponent. You would then take the other game piece "captive" and change direction to drag it back to your "home" end of the board. Once this was done, you could re-enter your piece into play, while the captive marker was "dead". Play continued in this way until all of one side's pieces were dead.
With two players, as soon as one captured the other's marker, there was no way to prevent it from being carried off the board. With multiple players divided into two teams, the situation was different. While partners could not take each other captive, they could capture an opponent's piece before it was brought a captive to the end of the board by landing in the space it occupied, dragging both the captured piece and the opponent's marker towards the other end of the board, where the partner's marker was freed to be put back into play, while the opponent's piece was dead. If enough people were involved in the game, it could take up to three hours for all of one side's pieces to be killed. http://www.halfmoon.org/bul.html
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