Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game

Were your kids interested in the election? Mine sure were. And even if they weren't old enough to appreciate the issues at play, there was still plenty to talk about - the Electoral College, the houses of Congress, and all sorts of other topics that piqued my kids' interest.

Of course, they were already interested because of my (late, lamented) run for city council this summer. Since then, I had been on the lookout for a board game that had an election-based theme. And I found a fun one! It's a gerrymandering game called Mapmaker.

How to Play

In Mapmaker, you each take the role of a political party, divvying up territory into districts. At the start of the game, you shuffle all the voter tokens and place them randomly on the hexagonal sections of the board.

Each player takes turns, placing up to 4 black barriers that divide the territory into districts. Each district must contain at least four hexes, but they can be larger (just so long as they couldn't be subdivided into smaller districts).

Once a district has been created, you count up the number of votes for each party. Whichever party has the most votes, wins the district. At the end of the game, the player with the most districts is the winner.

Each player starts out with the same number of voters, so how can you possibly win? By gerrymandering, of course! Stuff as many of your opponents' voters into a single district as possible. That's how the pros do it,, of course. In Alabama, about 37% of our population voted for Joe Biden, but only one district out of seven congresspeople is reliably Democratic, which accounts for 14% of our congressional delegation.

How'd we get 37% of voters to have 14% representation? With a district that looks like this, which reaches up from the Black Belt to snatch Birmingham while dutifully avoiding all its suburbs...

Where's the Math?

Mapmaker is a great game because the math is very approachable for young kids, but the deeper ideas of fair apportionment and civics will keep much older children engaged.

The ideal strategy is to win each district by as little as possible, so that you don't "waste" votes in a district you've already won. Conversely, you want your opponent to be stuck with all their votes concentrated in a couple of districts. So your child is doing all sorts of simple addition and subtraction, but they're also paying attention to the area-control elements of the game. They might see a perfect district to create, but can they ensure success before their opponent splits the territory up themselves? The strategy of the game is deeper than you might expect.

In addition to the arithmetic and spatial reasoning your kids will do, they might be confronted with deeper questions about what system of district creation is "fair." As I mentioned above, only one of Alabama's seven congressional districts is reliably democratic, although democrats are over 1/3 of the population. There's another way that our state could be split up: with every district containing 35% democrats and 65% republicans. This would be "fair" by some definitions, but would also lead to complete one-party control of the state's delegation. 

We know when a system feels unfair, but it's surprisingly difficult to build a districting system that is fair by every possible criterion. This article by Patrick Honner might be interesting to you and your older kids and prompt some interesting discussions about your own state's district maps!

Click here to buy Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game