The Keeper's Accounts

Garcilaso de la Vega was born in Cuzco in 1539, the son of a Spanish cavalier and an Inca princess, and spent his first twenty years among his mother's people. He wrote that when chiefs came to pay their tribute at Christmas or on St. John's Day, they asked his mother to have him check their accounts against their khipus, "because, being a suspicious people, they would not trust the Spaniards to deal fairly with them."

Now you check them. Each day a chief makes five claims. Tap the cord the claim is about, read its knots, and say whether the khipu agrees; if it doesn't, pick what it really holds. Garcilaso's rules: a cord's color tells what it counts (yellow gold, white silver, red soldiers). Things with no color go in order of importance, the most important first: for arms, lances, darts, bows and arrows, shields, axes, slings. People go by age, men of sixty and over first, then fifty, forty and down. A top cord holds the sum of a group. The game is a draft and not yet checked.