The Popol Vuh tells how the ballplayer twins Hun Hunahpu and Vucub Hunahpu, playing too noisily above the underworld realm of Xibalba, are summoned below by its lords, tricked through a sequence of deadly trial houses, and killed; Hun Hunahpu's severed head is hung in a calabash tree, where it spits into the hand of a passing underworld maiden, Xquic, and impregnates her. Fleeing to the surface world pregnant, Xquic gives birth to a second generation of twins, Hunahpu and Xbalanque, who grow up skilled ballplayers themselves and eventually, after recovering their dead father's ballgame equipment, are summoned to Xibalba in turn by its lords, annoyed at the game's renewed noise.
Unlike their father and uncle, the younger twins survive the same sequence of trial houses, the Dark House, the Razor House, the Cold House, the Jaguar House, the Fire House, and the Bat House, through cleverness and careful preparation rather than being caught unaware, though Hunahpu briefly loses his head to a bat in the last of these before Xbalanque restores it.
The ballgame itself is not incidental to the conflict: the Mesoamerican ballgame carried deep cosmological significance across the region, frequently associated with the movement of celestial bodies and with contests between the forces of life and the underworld, so that the twins' repeated confrontations with Xibalba over noisy games read as a recurring cosmic contest rather than a simple dispute between neighbors.