Puluc

Puluc is an ancient Maya racing game played on a linear track of 11 spaces marked out on the ground with corn cobs. Each player races 5 sticks along the road (bej) from their end toward the opponent's end - home to the field (kol). Rules follow the Brewster/Acosta version.

1. Corn dice: throw 4 flat corn kernels, each with a charcoal-burned "eye" on one face. Count the eyes facing up for your move. All blank or all eyes = move 4 spaces.
2. After rolling, click a highlighted piece on the board (or your entry zone) to move it. Your entry zone is on the left; your pieces move right.
3. Enter new pieces: click your entry zone (left side) to bring a waiting piece onto the track at the rolled distance.
4. Capture: if your piece lands on an opponent's piece, you capture it - it becomes a prisoner carried under your piece. The stack moves together.
5. Releasing prisoners: if your stack is captured, all prisoners you held are freed back to their owner's entry pool.
6. When your stack exits the far end, any prisoners it carried are also released back to the opponent.
7. Win condition: first player to move all 5 of their pieces off the far end wins.

Puluc (also called bul or boolik) is a game of the Q'eqchi' Maya of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala. When Stewart Culin described it in 1907 there was no board at all: players swept a patch of clay floor clean, laid down a row of grains of corn to divide the track, and played at night by firelight. The dice are four flat corn kernels, each with a charcoal-burned "eye" on one face; the playing pieces are plain split sticks, one side's peeled pale and the other's left dark.

The drama is in the capturing. A stick that lands on an enemy does not remove it - it picks it up, and the prisoner is carried underneath as the stack runs for home ("I grabbed his load!"). Pieces finally retired from play are set aside in what players call the house of the dead. Around the fire, onlookers call out, tease, and wager over every throw.

Far from disappearing, the game lives on. The anthropologist Lieve Verbeeck documented Q'eqchi' farmers in the 1990s playing bul through the night before maize planting - a "vigil of the maize" kept over cups of cacao, with the corn that served as track, dice, and pieces thrown away at dawn. Woven into the corn cycle itself, the game's survival is a testament to the resilience of Maya culture through centuries of colonialism and erasure.