Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- I love the idea! Took a while for my gf and I to get used to it, but it's so much fun now!by VarunMenon
- I LOVE that people are creating things like this. The best way to complain is to make things. More power to you!by conartist6
- 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.
by pavel_lishin - 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!by jrmg
- I think I did not understand this game well. May I suggest adding a few introductory levels of increasing difficulty for beginners.by coder97
- 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.
- 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 !!by srameshc
- Glad you enjoyed it!
- 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.by summarybot
- I'm also a fan of making it 30k:1. You wouldn't even need to send everyone to DC, it could be done nearly 100% remote these days.
As long as I'm waving my magic wand around, I'd also like to see it handled more like jury duty, the representative just gets picked at random from the pool of 30k. Or maybe randomly select 10 people, and that's who we get to vote for. Then after 2 years, they get to run for re-election one time, and if they fail to get a majority, we randomly pick another 10 candidates.
by psadauskas - There has to be a better way of representing a population than our current system. There is just no way you can represent real, complex, demographics in a fair and proportional way -- there are an unlimited number of ways to categorize people, and by grouping them one way you will often exclude grouping them in other, and perhaps not less significant ways. What you end up with is a very skewed representation of a population that's only bounded to reality through our notions of which category they belong to.
- by soupspaces
- This is a strong argument for a broken status quo. It’s essentially dismissing many possible, tangible, in other places implemented approaches to improve representation, by essentially declaring that fixing the system cannot be done, or must first involve some completely new solution.by ant6n
- Some cantons in Switzerland use a system called biproportional apportionment. They say "okay, party A got 25% of the votes, so they must get 25% of the seats. And district 1 accounts for 30% of the population, so they must get 30% of the seats." And so on. Then they do some matrix math to determine who gets what seats in which districts. The method ensures each party gets the right total number of seats while each district gets its predetermined seat count. You could in principle extend the method to handle three or more dimensions.by ChadNauseam
- Germany uses mixed-member proportional representation. You cast two votes in each federal election: one vote for a registered political party at the federal level and one vote for among a list of local candidates from those parties. The ballots famously have the phrase "You have 2 voices/votes" ("Sie haben 2 Stimmen") on the top [1].
The seats in the Bundestag are parceled out in proportion to shares of the national vote among federally recognized parties, and each party has a list of candidates who may or may not get a seat from that party's resulting allotment, based in part on the popularity of those candidates in their local list elections. The math of it is a bit more complicated than that, but it works quite well to completely sidestep the gerrymandering problem. The flipside is that parties must be registered federally to participate, and this gives the government a great deal of implicit power to exclude parties it doesn't like.
CGP Grey has a good YouTube video explaining it, probably better than I have here [2].
[1]: https://thumbs.dreamstime.com/z/german-election-ballot-paper...
by sfRattan - 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.by aureate
- 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.
by bhouston - 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
by WalterBright - 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.
- 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.
by cyode - 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/2026-06-17by Wowfunhappy
- Yes indeed, not super realistic, since it would never happen. but it does make for a more fun puzzle :)
- 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/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.by shagie - > 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...
by toast0 - 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.by amethyst
- 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!
by eig