250-900 CE
The Maya of the Classic period built a civilization of rival city-states in the tropical lowlands of Central America, producing the most sophisticated writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, a calendar of extraordinary precision, and limestone pyramid-cities that rose above the jungle canopy.
The Classic Maya were not an empire but a civilization of competing city-states spread across the limestone lowlands of the Yucatan peninsula, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras. Each city had its own dynasty, its own patron gods, and its own ambitions. Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque, Copan: these were rivals that fought, traded, married into each other's royal houses, and spent centuries jockeying for regional dominance without any single center ever unifying the whole.
What bound them together was a shared culture of remarkable sophistication. The Maya developed the only fully literate writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas, a script of glyphic blocks that recorded history, astronomy, ritual, and political propaganda on stone monuments, painted ceramics, and bark-paper codices.
The Maya lowlands are flat limestone country covered in dense tropical forest, crossed by no major rivers in the northern Yucatan and drained by seasonal waterways in the south. Rainfall was abundant but seasonal, and water management, cenotes, reservoirs, and canal systems, determined where cities could grow. Maize farming in milpa plots, cleared from the forest by slash-and-burn methods, fed the population. A farmer felling trees with a stone axe in March, burning the dried brush in April, and planting maize in the ash before the May rains arrived, followed a cycle that had sustained the lowlands for millennia.
Cacao grew in the humid lowlands and was consumed as a bitter, spiced drink by the elite. Jade, traded from highland Guatemala, was valued above gold. Cotton and salt moved through market networks. A woman grinding maize on a metate at dawn, shaping the dough into tortillas on a clay griddle, performed the act that defined Mesoamerican domestic life from the earliest farming villages to the present day.
Maya warfare was frequent, ritualized, and focused on capturing rival elites rather than destroying enemy populations. A victorious king displayed his captives on carved monuments before sacrificing them. Wars between cities could last generations, with alliances shifting constantly. The great rivalry between Tikal and Calakmul dominated Classic Maya geopolitics for over a century, each city assembling coalitions of smaller states against the other.
Armies fought on foot with obsidian-tipped spears, clubs, and atlatl darts. There were no draft animals and no metal weapons. Military success depended on numbers, ambush, and the morale effect of capturing the enemy king. The tropical terrain made sustained campaigns difficult: armies marched through jungle on narrow trails, and supply lines were impossible to maintain over long distances.
Maya religion was an elaborate system connecting the human world to an underworld of gods, ancestors, and supernatural forces. Kings served as intermediaries, performing bloodletting rituals in which they pierced their own flesh to feed the gods. A queen drawing a thorn-studded rope through her tongue in a darkened temple chamber, her blood dripping onto bark paper that would be burned to carry the offering skyward, participated in a devotion that was physically agonizing and politically essential.
Maya astronomers tracked the movements of Venus with an accuracy that modern instruments have difficulty improving upon. Their calendar system combined a 260-day ritual count with a 365-day solar year, and a Long Count that placed every event within a framework spanning millions of years. Scribes recorded royal histories on stone stelae erected at regular intervals, creating a dated historical record unmatched elsewhere in the Americas.
The Classic Maya traded with Teotihuacan and other highland Mexican powers, and the influence flowed both ways. Teotihuacan-style architecture and imagery appeared at Tikal and other cities, though whether this represents conquest, alliance, or cultural borrowing remains debated. Coastal trade moved salt, obsidian, jade, and cacao around the Yucatan peninsula and along the Caribbean coast in large dugout canoes.
The Classic Maya collapse of the ninth century remains one of the great puzzles of archaeology. City after city in the southern lowlands was abandoned over the course of a century. Warfare, drought, overpopulation, and environmental degradation have all been proposed as causes, and the answer is probably some combination of all of them. The Maya did not disappear; millions of Maya-speaking people live in the region today. But the classic city-state civilization, with its kings, its scribes, and its towering limestone pyramids, ended, and the jungle reclaimed what had been built.
of your color to take 1 
to your hand
, you may spend 3 
to pay -1 
from your hand to make them draw +1 or -1 cube from the bag (your choice)
from your hand to transfer up to 5 Buildings on your player mat between different areas
In the game, the Maya are knowledge-obsessed city-builders who sacrifice units for technologies the way Maya kings offered blood for cosmic knowledge. Destroying a unit to draw a technology card is your engine; build cities early so you can replace the sacrificed population cheaply. Military technologies become ammunition, discarded to add or subtract cube draws from any player's bag at any moment, giving you battlefield influence without needing a strong army. Economy technologies restructure your player mat buildings on demand. Like all New World nations, you cannot recruit spearmen or cavalry, so avoid cavalry-heavy opponents and invest in the knowledge that is your real weapon.
From the current Age's technology deck.
No. A card in hand cannot be activated. You must research it first. However, researching a card from your hand is a free action: you do not spend action cubes on the technology grid, only pay the technology's resource and product cost.
No. The ability applies once per technology researched, reducing the cost by 1 product for 3 resources.
Yes. The ability triggers when anyone draws cubes, including yourself. You may make yourself draw +1 or -1 cube.
After bag preparation is complete but before cubes are actually drawn. You declare the discard and specify +1 or -1 before the drawing begins.
You move building tokens between areas on your player mat. Empty slots represent buildings already constructed on the map. Moving a token from the barracks area to an empty market slot transforms a market into a barracks. This immediately changes what your built structures are.