[cyode]

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.

[eig]

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!

[dmurray]

Have you played the game? The board today has three parties and the winning solution is to make sure your party wins one district and the other parties tie in the other four.

Under any real world system, you will lose this election if you rig it this way. You just can't predict who will win it instead.

[rainsford]

Edit: Per a comment below, this does not seem like a regular feature of the game, just an oddity of today. It would still be worth figuring out a way to eliminate the tie issue or at least ensure it's less of a factor in future games, but the game is much more fun on average overall than today's game suggests

Yeah I don't know if that was just the puzzle today, since this is the first time I've heard of or played this game, but that feature seemed like a disappointing execution of an otherwise genuinely unique idea.

Winning a single district for your extremely minority party while locking the other two parties out of winning anything isn't even remotely analogous to how real world gerrymandering works, at least in the US where the term is typically used. It also feels like cheating, since it relies primarily on exploiting a flaw that exists exclusively in the game but not in real life. I'm all for simplification of real world factors in games, but not to the point where the entire path to victory relies on that simplification.

A more accurate and more interesting variation would be to just have two parties with puzzles that rely on crafting districts where the party with fewer voters wins the majority of seats, with the challenge coming from voter distribution patterns that make it hard to create winning districts while following the game's rules. The addition of a third party and ties that result in nobody winning seem both unnecessary and worse.

[waterTanuki]

The goal of this puzzle appears to be to get more people to talk about the issue and push for change. In these things, you can have either popularity or nuance but not both. The average American can't even read, let alone understand the nuance or complexity in how gerrymandering "actually" works.

[toast0]

> This isn't realistic as ties don't happen in practice in elections, and some party will end up representing it.

Ties happen from time to time. Here's one I could find [1], and I recall one that I can't find maybe a decade ago in coastal northern california that they resolved by throwing dice.

[1] https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2024/dec/4/election-tie-blue-la...

[gs17]

I think it wasn't so much that ties aren't possible, but that ties don't mean "no one wins". If you make one district safe and three districts are a coin toss between your two rivals, one of them has much more power than you in the end.

[amethyst]

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.

[shagie]

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...

    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.

... and a review of it in context: https://civiceducator.org/review-mapmaker-gerrymandering/

[sfRattan]

I picked up a copy on ebay a while after the Kickstarter!

Mapmaker is a great game for tabletop veterans and newbies alike, although the first playthrough can be a little opaque even to regular gamers (especially the first few moves when there are no established district boundaries yet). It definitely benefits from repeat play, goes quickly once you know the rules, and has you doing only one thing each turn.

Definitely a game that has earned a permanent place in my collection.

[realmofthemad]

Yes indeed, not super realistic, since it would never happen. but it does make for a more fun puzzle :)

[Wowfunhappy]

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