Puluc

2 players · about 10 minutes

Puluc — also called Bul or Boolik — is an ancient game of the Maya peoples of the Guatemalan highlands. It is a running-fight game: two small armies run down the same narrow track in opposite directions, and when one warrior catches another it does not remove it but climbs on top of it. The prisoner is dragged along underneath, and can be freed again if a friend recaptures the pile — so a single space can carry a tug-of-war several warriors deep.

Objective

Permanently kill all five of your opponent's warriors. A warrior is only killed by being carried as a prisoner off the far end of the track.

Components

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The track — eleven spaces in a line, numbered 1 to 11, with a home base at each end.

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The warriors — five each. Jade enters at space 1 and runs towards 11; Cinnabar enters at space 11 and runs towards 1. Both armies begin in their home bases, off the track.

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The lots — four binary dice, traditionally corn kernels burned black on one side, or marked casting sticks.

A turn

Each turn has two parts: cast the lots, then make one move.

The first player alternates between games: Jade opens the first game, Cinnabar the next, and so on.

1. Cast the lots

Press the tray of four lots. How many land marked-side up gives your movement:

Marked side up

You move

1 space

2 spaces

3 spaces

4 spaces

0 (all blank)

5 spaces

All four blank is the rarest throw and also the longest stride.

2. Move

Spend the whole cast on exactly one of these. The board rings every space you can press in gold.

Deploy — bring one warrior out of your home base onto your entry space (space 1 for Jade, space 11 for Cinnabar). Any cast can deploy; the value is not used for anything else, so a big throw spent on a deployment is a big throw spent.

A deployment captures, like any other move. If an enemy — or a whole enemy pile — is standing on your entry space, deploying onto it takes it, on any cast. That makes your own entry space dangerous ground for your opponent, and it means a player with a warrior still in hand can always find a move.

Advance — move a warrior, or a pile you command, forward by exactly the cast. Warriors only ever move forward, towards the enemy's home base.

Carry off — if the cast would take a pile past the last space, it leaves the track into the enemy's home base. See Killing prisoners below.

You may not land on a space you already command — that is, one where your own warrior is on top of the pile. You may land on a space the enemy commands: that is how you capture.

If no warrior of yours can use the cast, the turn is forfeited — press "No move — forfeit the cast".

Capture and stacking

This is what makes Puluc Puluc.

Landing on an enemy captures it. Your warrior is placed directly on top of the enemy warrior, forming a pile. The enemy is not removed from the board — it is a prisoner.

Whoever is on top commands the pile. Only the commander can move it, and when it moves the whole pile travels with it. A warrior three deep in a pile is being carried around by its captor.

Landing on an enemy pile captures the entire pile. Your warrior goes on the very top and the momentum of the whole stack switches sides at once — including any of your own warriors that were prisoners in it. A four-deep pile can change hands on a single cast.

The colours you can see in a pile are exactly its prisoners, so a pile is always readable: the warrior on top is the commander, and everyone below is a captive.

Killing prisoners

Prisoners are only killed when they are carried off the far end of the track. When a cast would take a pile past the last space, the pile leaves the board into the enemy's home base, and:

Every enemy warrior in the pile is permanently dead — out of the game for good. Those are the kills that win the war.

Your own warriors in the pile — the commander, plus any of your warriors it rescued from further down the pile — go back to your home base, ready to be deployed again.

A lone warrior with no prisoners may also leave the track; it simply walks home empty-handed and can be deployed again later. (This matters: without it, warriors would pile up at the far end with no legal move for the rest of the game.)

Winning

The first player to permanently kill all five enemy warriors wins.

Two armies that keep missing each other could in principle shuttle up and down the track forever, so a game that reaches 240 casts without a result is abandoned as a draw.

Notes on the rules

Puluc is an oral folk game, so variants exist. Where the sources disagree, this implementation makes the following choices, and says so here rather than leaving them to be discovered:

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Eleven spaces. Boards of nine are equally traditional.

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Deployment goes to the entry space, whatever the cast. Some versions instead enter a warrior cast spaces onto the track. The choice has two consequences worth stating outright: a player holding a reserve can capture whatever sits on their entry space on every cast, and a player holding a reserve can never be forced to forfeit. Neither is true in the "enter cast spaces" version.

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You may not land where you command. The traditional phrasing forbids landing on "your own unstacked warrior", which leaves open whether you may merge two piles you already command. Forbidding it throughout is simpler, and it is what lets a single press be unambiguous: a space you command can only ever be a pile you are moving from, and a space you do not can only ever be a space you are moving to.

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A lone warrior may leave the track. Some accounts require a pile (that is, at least one prisoner) to leave. That version strands lone warriors at the far end permanently, and a position where neither side can move is a game that never ends.

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Prisoners are dragged forwards. A popular regional variant instead requires a pile to reverse direction the moment it captures, so the captor must drag its prisoners back to its own home base to kill them. That variant is not implemented here.

Credits

Puluc is a traditional Maya game and is in the public domain.