Patolli was played across Mesoamerica for well over a thousand years. Boards are scratched into stone at Teotihuacan, found among the Maya, and described by Spanish chroniclers at the Aztec court, where it was said to be a favourite of Moctezuma. Players raced counters around a cross-shaped board, throwing marked beans for their moves, and wagered heavily on the outcome.
This version follows the reconstruction R. C. Bell published in Board and Table Games (1960), drawn from the early Spanish accounts. Its board is sixty squares in a cross: four arms of fourteen meeting at a central four. The printed boards draw that cross as a diagonal X; here it is set square to the screen so each player's arm faces them. Each player has six pieces, and moves are thrown with five beans marked on one face.
Bell's game is not the fifty-two-square version described in most popular accounts, and the difference matters. Here there is no capture at all. A piece may never land on an occupied square, whether the occupant belongs to you or to your opponent, so every piece is safe wherever it stands and the whole of the strategy is blocking: a row of pieces on consecutive squares closes a path, and the wedge-marked squares make some ground expensive to hold. Rounded squares at the tips of the cross grant another turn, and a piece leaves the board only on an exact throw onto the last square.
Two players share one screen, a phone passed between hands or a laptop set between you. Throw the beans, then tap or drag one of the highlighted pieces. Your first piece enters from the square nearest you and you choose which way round the cross to travel; after that, a new piece enters only on a throw of one. First side to bring all six pieces around the board and off wins the game and the pot. No computer opponent, no account, nothing to install; the game runs entirely in your browser and remembers an unfinished match on your device.
Also from Aakkagam Games: Senet, the ancient Egyptian race game, align3, three men's morris on the Roman and Tamil boards, and Ostomachion, Archimedes' fourteen-piece square puzzle.