Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game
You are a mapmaker, which means you make maps... and determine who wins elections.
You belong to a political party: Red Elephants, Blue Donkeys, Yellow Porcupines, or Green Leaves. Your only job? Make sure your party wins the next election. You get to redraw the districts. But so do the other mapmakers.
You must scramble to draw the best lines first. Can you crack and pack voters? Can you scheme and strategize? Can you create unfair, lopsided, strangely shaped districts that will guarantee your party's victory?
Number of players: 2 - 4
Game duration: 13 mn
Complexity: 2 / 5
Play Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game and 959 other games online.
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Play Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game and 959 other games online.
No download necessary - play directly from your web browser.
With your friends and thousands of players from the whole world.
Free.
Rules summary
For tips on how to play mapmaker, see Tips_mapmaker
Theme
- You are a mapmaker, which means you make maps... and determine who wins elections.
Setup
- Each player chooses a party: Red Elephants, Blue Donkeys, Yellow Porcupines, or Green Leaves.
- Voter tokens of the participating parties, along with the neutral token, are randomly distributed across the board.
- Each party has tokens numbered 2 through 9 twice, plus a single 1 and a single 10.
- With two players, only the central 37 counties are in play.
- With three players, there are 55 counties, and with four, all 73 counties are played.
- Note: this random setup does not give any player a noticeable advantage.
Goal
- At the end of the game, the entire board will be sectioned off into districts.
- Whoever has the most districts wins.
Game play
- Players take turns placing district borders:
- The first player starts by placing only one district border.
- The second player places two. The next places three.
- Then players continue in order, each placing four district borders per turn.
- You can place district borders near one another or scattered across the board.
- You cannot place them on edges of the board.
- When the entire board is split into districts, the game ends.
Districts
- A district is a fully closed-off group of counties satisfying the following properties:
- There are at least 4 counties.
- There is no way to split the counties into smaller districts.
- All counties must become part of a district.
- You can never surround fewer than four counties.
- Note: it is possible to form districts of greater than 8 counties.
- This will happen if the group cannot be split into separate districts of at least four counties each.
- e.g. a Y-shaped district may not be split-able.
- When a district is formed, the player with the most votes wins the district.
- The winner places one of their district markers inside the district.
- The winner of the district does not need to be the player who closes it off.
- However, if there is a tie for most votes, whoever closed off the district gets to choose the winner among the tied players.
The winner
- Whoever has the most districts at the end of the game wins.
- If there is a tie, whoever (among tied players) controls the most swing counties wins.
- A swing county is a county valued 0 or 1 (coloured purple).
