Patolli was the great domestic game of the Aztec world — a cross-shaped race game played on a mat marked with fifty-two squares mirroring the fifty-two-year calendar round of the Mesoamerican Long Count. Its tutelary god was Macuilxochitl, "Five Flower," also called Xochipilli — patron of games, fate, and pleasure. Players invoked the god before each throw of the bean-dice and offered tribute on every zero roll; the winner received these as the god's gift. Fray Diego Durán and Bernardino de Sahagún recorded Aztec nobles wagering jewelry, homes, families, and their own freedom; Sahagún wrote that during play "heads were constantly split open … just as on the ball court." The game is documented in the Florentine Codex, the Codex Mendoza, and the Codex Magliabechiano — three of the most important colonial-era sources on pre-Columbian Mesoamerican life. Patolli is the only game in world history (alongside Liubo) that so explicitly fuses calendar, cosmology, ritual, and binary-die chance into a single domestic practice. The Academy hosts it in the Heart School because its central exercise is devotional: the player does not merely risk possessions but offers them, and the game's mechanics make the offering literal rather than metaphorical. To study Patolli is to encounter the spirituality of risk — what it means to wager identity in a cosmos where the gods play alongside you, and where the throw of the dice is simultaneously an act of chance and an act of prayer.