Patolli was played across pre Hispanic central Mexico on a distinctive cross shaped board, typically marked out on a woven mat or drawn on the ground, along which players moved markers according to throws of marked beans functioning as dice, a chance driven mechanic that placed the game squarely within the same broad category of divinatory and fortune linked board games found in many ancient societies, where the fall of a chance element is read as meaningful rather than as mere randomness.
Sixteenth century Spanish colonial chroniclers, most extensively the Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagun in his ethnographic compilation of Aztec life and custom, describe patolli as widespread and enormously popular across Aztec society, played avidly across social classes and closely associated with gambling, players staking goods, and by report sometimes considerable personal possessions, on the game's outcome.
The game's patron deity was Macuilxochitl, five flower, a god associated with pleasure, games, gambling, excess and its risks, and by extension with music and feasting, an association that positioned patolli within Aztec religion not as morally neutral recreation but as an activity carrying its own divine sponsorship and, implicitly, its own divine oversight of fortune won and lost.