Patolli was played across central Mexico on a cross shaped board, its outcome decided by throws of marked beans, and colonial Spanish sources describe it as taken seriously enough that authorities eventually moved to suppress it. Underneath that seriousness stood Macuilxochitl, the patron the same colonial accounts name directly as presiding over the game and the gambling built into it. A religious framing for something European observers saw as mere recreation is itself a useful reminder that for the Aztecs the line between play and the sacred did not sit where later observers assumed it would.
Standing close beside Macuilxochitl in nearly every account is Xochipilli, Flower Prince, patron of art, music, beauty and, by the same colonial record, of patolli as well. The overlap is not incidental. Some scholarship treats the two as effectively one deity presented under two names emphasizing different sides of a single complex of pleasure, games and flowers; other accounts keep them as distinct figures who happen to share a portfolio, Macuilxochitl the narrower gambling and excess specialist among the five Ahuiateteo, Xochipilli the broader patron of beauty and the arts. The atlas records the association as scholarship actually states it, real and close, rather than resolving it into a false certainty either way.
What is not in question is how the game ended. Patolli was not merely disapproved of but actively suppressed under Spanish colonial rule, and it survives today chiefly through those same colonial descriptions and through archaeological board fragments rather than as a continuous living practice, leaving Macuilxochitl himself a god known almost entirely through the record of what was taken away from him.