Spanish colonial authorities took a dim view of patolli almost from first contact, targeting the game for suppression on grounds that combined religious objection, since its patron deity and its use in divinatory and ceremonial contexts marked it as bound up with the Indigenous religion the colonial project sought to eradicate, with more purely moral disapproval of the extensive gambling the game involved, a combination of motives colonial sources themselves record fairly explicitly. That sustained suppression across the colonial period means patolli, unlike some other Mesoamerican games, did not survive into the present as a continuously played living tradition in anything like its original form, and what is known of it today rests substantially on the colonial ethnographic record, above all Sahagun's account, and on the comparatively limited archaeological and iconographic evidence of the boards and equipment themselves, since a board game leaves less durable trace than a masonry ballcourt.
Modern scholarly and cultural interest in patolli has produced reconstructed versions of the game played today chiefly in educational, museum and cultural heritage contexts in Mexico rather than as an unbroken folk tradition, a revival built from historical reconstruction rather than continuous transmission, distinguishing patolli's survival pattern from games such as the Mesoamerican ballgame, whose descendant, ulama, continued in living regional play.