I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:
> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.
This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc.
If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
We did these sorts of exercises in my high school social studies class, in Ohio, back in 2002ish. I fear it may have been instructive to some of my classmates rather than warning them of the inherent evils.
It's a major factor in today's puzzle, but it doesn't seem to come up as much in past puzzles. I think yesterday's is more fun and doesn't have the unrealism. https://gerrymandle.cc/game/2026-06-17
We're three siblings from a gerrymandered district in Austin, Texas, and this is the story of how we designed a board game about gerrymandering — and ended up at the Supreme Court with 82 copies of Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.
Lovely game! Takes a bit of fiddling to get the hang of it, but so do most puzzles worth doing. The instructions are clear, the presentation is great and I like the decision to prioritise a fun game over representing real Gerrymandering accurately. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this.
An interesting mathematical curiosity, but kinda seems to ignore the political realities that make gerrymandering happen in the first place. If you had the will to make this happen, why would you not just do proportional representation? The modern point of having districts is to gerrymander.
Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!
The number of voting members has been strictly capped at 435 since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep.
In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep.
At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.
I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.
The House is a group of individuals that are so afraid to defy the president because the President can send a bunch of money to primary any one who disagrees with them. Big districts require a lot of money to run a campaign. Small districts mean you don't need a lot of money, and heck they might already know you. A larger house means more political independence from the bully-pulpit.
And the House is MEANT to be cacophonous and boisterous. Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House. Within a decade or two, it will be 1M citizens per House Rep. Adn everyone of them will bought, because you have to be bought to get elected.
1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red
2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own. You'd end up even closer to parliamentary-style party leader control of the House, which personally I'd like to avoid.
Combining these two points, you'd have even more ideologically intense & disciplined parties with smaller districts/a larger House- the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve I think
3. 'Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House' this would be news to say Germany, which recently ended its famous 70+ year old MMP system precisely because their lower house kept expanding too much. They found the issue logistically too difficult to deal with, and are now moving to a more classic PR setup
Bonus extra point- the UK already has one of the world's largest lower houses, with relatively small districts and lots of local representation. Is the UK particularly well-governed, do you think? Small single member districts are rent-seeking machines- way too easy for a local rep to get captured by Major Local Employer (or NIMBY group)
It'd be interesting to run some numerical simulations to see at what number of Reps coordination becomes unfeasible or leads to perennial grid-lock. The Senate, on the other hand, is the "saucer" for the hot tea of the Lower House. Back in the day, people would pour tea from the tea cup straight into the saucer to cool it down, and sup from the saucer directly. Which means that the saucer "cooled down" the ferocity and fiery intensity of the "discussions" in the Lower House. Does this relationship still hold if the Lower House is significantly more populated? Probably. But that might also be worth investigating.
Larger house does impose some needs for restructuring business in the House. An expansion of the committee system, a reworking of important comittees into small Houses, where those houses have various committees,because clearly the current comittee system would concentrate important positions to too few (as a proportion) of Representatives. This could allow for greater specialization of comittees and people, which is probably a good thing given today's complexities.
I love the idea .. how you changed an important issue into a game and probably that would bring awareness. I am not an expert but such decisions probably affect a lot of people and no one spend time and learn about it. This is a fun way to learn. Thank you !!
I do believe the solution to gerrymandering in general is to move towards proportional representation so that the individual boundaries of a distinct are not as influential.
Maybe add that as an option to the game?
I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.
I'm sorry you've found it a bit difficult to pick up! There is an introduction below the game, but it can still be a bit hard to follow since it's all text. I'll see about adding an additional, optional, interactive tutorial.
This felt very satisfying to win! (Day 39) I'll try to remember to keep coming back.
I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.
From a didactic perspective, it would cool if the result-screen illustrated how some voting-reform would have solved the sneaky win... but I guess that's not practical, since it'd rely on additional data which would detract from the ludic experience.
For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.
I know your threw an "etc" in there; but, all fingers point to my home state: Texas. We need two legislative changes at the federal level: (1) uncap the house from 435 to at least cube-root or (better) max 500k; and, (2) you can't be sworn in unless your district was from an ICRC or statistically equivalent object.
Personally I've been very surprised with the public support for the increase in political gerrymandering. I know that people think it is worth it for the short term gains, but it still seems like a bad idea to me.
Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
very basic issue, its not clear to me how to start a new district, it just extends the old one. I managed to do it accidentally a couple times, but I don't know how
By default, you work on one district at a time. Clicking adds tiles to the current district until the current district is full, then clicking will create a new district. District size is determined per round, described at the top as eg. "draw 5 districts of 4 populated tiles".
You can also click a square in the "Districts" section of the header to switch to a different district, including an empty one to create a new one.
I’m on mobile and that works for me sometimes but other times it just decides the district I’m working on is done and starts a new one. It’s not clear to me why or how to get that to not happen
Cool concept tho! Would like to play it if I could only understand how
Districts are connected regions that can contain at most 4 houses. If you click on a house that is too far away from your started district, it might not be possible to span the distance. In that case it creates a new region instead
Sorry this isn't super clear. I'll try to think of a way to make it more intuitive.
I could see this being a great activity in a high school civics class. Very creative. One rule that tripped me up is:
> If two parties tie in a district, nobody wins it.
This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it. But the spirit of the gerrymandering concept is conveyed well enough.
In real-life, before the election there is a margin of error on the support of a bloc.
If you interpret a "tie" in this game as "either party could win within the margin of error", then it becomes a lot closer to solving the problem that gerrymandering algorithms try to solve in real life!
We did these sorts of exercises in my high school social studies class, in Ohio, back in 2002ish. I fear it may have been instructive to some of my classmates rather than warning them of the inherent evils.
Yes indeed, not super realistic, since it would never happen. but it does make for a more fun puzzle :)
It's a major factor in today's puzzle, but it doesn't seem to come up as much in past puzzles. I think yesterday's is more fun and doesn't have the unrealism. https://gerrymandle.cc/game/2026-06-17
There's a board game from a few years ago that I'd recommend for such a situation: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/252997/mapmaker-the-gerr... - it was a kickstarter and available beyond that for a few years: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1639370584/mapmaker-the...
The designer diary: https://boardgamegeek.com/blog/1/blogpost/111646/designer-di...
... and a review of it in context: https://civiceducator.org/review-mapmaker-gerrymandering/Lovely game! Takes a bit of fiddling to get the hang of it, but so do most puzzles worth doing. The instructions are clear, the presentation is great and I like the decision to prioritise a fun game over representing real Gerrymandering accurately. It looks like a lot of thought has gone into this.
Some mathematicians worked out a way to fairly do districting, similar to having one kid cut the cake and the other kid gets first choice:
"A partisan districting protocol with provably nonpartisan outcomes" by Wesley Pegden, Ariel D. Procaccia, Dingli Yu https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.08781
An interesting mathematical curiosity, but kinda seems to ignore the political realities that make gerrymandering happen in the first place. If you had the will to make this happen, why would you not just do proportional representation? The modern point of having districts is to gerrymander.
Because local representation is important too?
Then run a hyperlocal party if you really have a constituency that cares deeply about their local issues and win enough votes to get a seat.
I love the idea! Took a while for my gf and I to get used to it, but it's so much fun now!
Tesselation Games’ ‘Berrymandering’ tabletop game is also a fun way to depress yourself - and a fun way to introduce the idea of gerrymandering to friends and family who don’t ‘get’ it - and depress them too!
https://www.tessellationgames.com/
The number of voting members has been strictly capped at 435 since the passage of the Permanent Apportionment Act of 1929.
In 1930, there was an average of 294k citizens per Rep. In 2020, there was an average of 761k citizens per Rep. At some points in U.S. history, the ratio was 30k:1.
I am not sure whether having very small districts would help or hurt gerrymandering, because it all depends on spatial constraints and spatial/density autocorrelation. I do think it would be good for the Republic if our representatives cam from a local community where you reasonably expect that might have gone to school with them, or have met them at the coffee shop before, and where they can run a campaign by personally knocking on doors, which can be done if the ratio was like 80k:1.
The House of Representatives is already a cacophonous, boisterous coliseum.
The House is a group of individuals that are so afraid to defy the president because the President can send a bunch of money to primary any one who disagrees with them. Big districts require a lot of money to run a campaign. Small districts mean you don't need a lot of money, and heck they might already know you. A larger house means more political independence from the bully-pulpit.
And the House is MEANT to be cacophonous and boisterous. Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House. Within a decade or two, it will be 1M citizens per House Rep. Adn everyone of them will bought, because you have to be bought to get elected.
Grouchy old political scientist here:
1. Due to geographic sorting smaller districts would be more intensely partisan than today, not less. A smaller land mass is going to be more deeply blue or red
2. A gigantic house would be less cacophonous and boisterous, not more so, because you'd need more hands-on party control to get anything done. It's deeply unrealistic that a huge mass of representatives are going to get anything passed on their own. You'd end up even closer to parliamentary-style party leader control of the House, which personally I'd like to avoid.
Combining these two points, you'd have even more ideologically intense & disciplined parties with smaller districts/a larger House- the exact opposite of what you're trying to achieve I think
3. 'Objections based on convenience and space, are not serious in terms of the meaning of the House' this would be news to say Germany, which recently ended its famous 70+ year old MMP system precisely because their lower house kept expanding too much. They found the issue logistically too difficult to deal with, and are now moving to a more classic PR setup
Bonus extra point- the UK already has one of the world's largest lower houses, with relatively small districts and lots of local representation. Is the UK particularly well-governed, do you think? Small single member districts are rent-seeking machines- way too easy for a local rep to get captured by Major Local Employer (or NIMBY group)
It'd be interesting to run some numerical simulations to see at what number of Reps coordination becomes unfeasible or leads to perennial grid-lock. The Senate, on the other hand, is the "saucer" for the hot tea of the Lower House. Back in the day, people would pour tea from the tea cup straight into the saucer to cool it down, and sup from the saucer directly. Which means that the saucer "cooled down" the ferocity and fiery intensity of the "discussions" in the Lower House. Does this relationship still hold if the Lower House is significantly more populated? Probably. But that might also be worth investigating.
Larger house does impose some needs for restructuring business in the House. An expansion of the committee system, a reworking of important comittees into small Houses, where those houses have various committees,because clearly the current comittee system would concentrate important positions to too few (as a proportion) of Representatives. This could allow for greater specialization of comittees and people, which is probably a good thing given today's complexities.
I love the idea .. how you changed an important issue into a game and probably that would bring awareness. I am not an expert but such decisions probably affect a lot of people and no one spend time and learn about it. This is a fun way to learn. Thank you !!
Glad you enjoyed it!
I do believe the solution to gerrymandering in general is to move towards proportional representation so that the individual boundaries of a distinct are not as influential.
Maybe add that as an option to the game?
I sort of think that the increasing drive to gerrymander everything to the extreme may eventually show that First Past the Post voting is fundamentally broken and we have to replace it with proportional representation - or at least that is my hope.
I think I did not understand this game well. May I suggest adding a few introductory levels of increasing difficulty for beginners.
I'm sorry you've found it a bit difficult to pick up! There is an introduction below the game, but it can still be a bit hard to follow since it's all text. I'll see about adding an additional, optional, interactive tutorial.
The controls are really frustrating on mobile. Clicking a new tile sometimes adds it to my district. Other times it makes a new district?
If a tile can be added to your district, it is added. Otherwise it makes a new district.
Since todays puzzle heavily relies on empty space, it can be a bit confusing. I'll try to make this a bit more clear for new players
This felt very satisfying to win! (Day 39) I'll try to remember to keep coming back.
I think what made me quite confused at the start is mis-reading the instructions that every district could have no more than four houses; I thought I had to split the land into equal areas. Once I understood that, the solution felt much easier.
From a didactic perspective, it would cool if the result-screen illustrated how some voting-reform would have solved the sneaky win... but I guess that's not practical, since it'd rely on additional data which would detract from the ludic experience.
For example, one can't show how ranked-choice voting would reduce the dodgy win of X without also knowing how the Y/Z populace breaks down in terms of voting for the other side over X.
Love this! It would be amazing to see daily puzzles built from actual historical maps. Letting people redraw a real gerrymandered district.
I'm getting SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG on Firefox.
I get the same error, and chrome fails also.
> Error Code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
Can't view it at all.
Can I redraw the districts to look like a Gerrymandlebrot set?
I won't let me complete the final district (YRBY+" "s) in today's puzzle. (firefox/linux) If I try to do it earlier it auto includes unwanted cells.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean, would you mind sending over a screenshot or video of where you are stuck?
[spoilers] https://snipboard.io/NZ8sa7.jpg
And that’s why we can’t have nice things
great idea to make Gerrymandle! congrats on the alpha
US/California etc gerrymandering is dramatically illegal IMHO. I see the recent gerrymandering in the USA as a kind of political cancer actually....
I know your threw an "etc" in there; but, all fingers point to my home state: Texas. We need two legislative changes at the federal level: (1) uncap the house from 435 to at least cube-root or (better) max 500k; and, (2) you can't be sworn in unless your district was from an ICRC or statistically equivalent object.
Personally I've been very surprised with the public support for the increase in political gerrymandering. I know that people think it is worth it for the short term gains, but it still seems like a bad idea to me.
Both US Republicans and Democrats are successfully selling to their constituents that the other party is guilty of egregious gerrymandering, so those constituents will support aggressive redistricting efforts to "even things out".
I think the average member of either party generally understands gerrymandering to be bad, but with an redistricting arms race escalating nobody wants to be left behind.
I think gerrymandering generally is abhorrent and anti democratic. At this point we need a new, more fair redistricting aggressively enforced from the top down to change course, and I'm not sure how we can get that through when it would likely take a 2/3rds majority in congress to pass... but significant members of congress benefit from gerrymandering and would lose their position in the next cycle if it were taken away, so they are unlikely to support the measure.
very basic issue, its not clear to me how to start a new district, it just extends the old one. I managed to do it accidentally a couple times, but I don't know how
By default, you work on one district at a time. Clicking adds tiles to the current district until the current district is full, then clicking will create a new district. District size is determined per round, described at the top as eg. "draw 5 districts of 4 populated tiles".
You can also click a square in the "Districts" section of the header to switch to a different district, including an empty one to create a new one.
I’m on mobile and that works for me sometimes but other times it just decides the district I’m working on is done and starts a new one. It’s not clear to me why or how to get that to not happen
Cool concept tho! Would like to play it if I could only understand how
Districts are connected regions that can contain at most 4 houses. If you click on a house that is too far away from your started district, it might not be possible to span the distance. In that case it creates a new region instead
Sorry this isn't super clear. I'll try to think of a way to make it more intuitive.