> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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...
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/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.