Cast the grains and run your pieces down the track, land on a rival to capture it and haul your prisoners home to score.
Bul, also called Puluc, is an ancient Maya running-fight race played on a single straight track. You enter from one end and run toward the other; your opponent enters from the opposite end and runs back at you. Pieces collide head-on, and a captured piece is carried along as a prisoner until its captor reaches the exit.
Bul is a running-fight game of the Maya, still played in parts of Guatemala and Belize and sometimes called boolik. Grains of corn are thrown as dice, and tokens race along a track that is often laid out on the ground with sticks or maize — a board assembled from whatever is to hand rather than a manufactured object.
It is not a pure race. Pieces travel up and down the track, and when two opposing pieces meet head-on the one that lands on the other captures it and carries it back toward home, so a player well ahead can lose everything to a single meeting. That reversal is the character of the game: position matters far less than what is coming toward you.
Bul is a traditional Mesoamerican race-and-capture game once played by the Maya with maize-grain dice. This is an original, free browser recreation of the public-domain game, no download or account required.