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Why a gerrymandering game?

The 2026 midterms are on 3 November. More than in any year in living memory, the House result depends on maps that were redrawn in the middle of the decade: nine states will vote on new lines this year, and courts blocked two more. Gerrymandering is easy to describe and hard to picture. Drawing a rigged map takes a couple of minutes, and after that you'll recognise one anywhere.

Nonpartisan by design

The game uses two made-up parties, Plum ● and ▲ Peach, on fictional states. You rig maps for both of them, and the last act asks you to draw fair ones. The 2026 Map War page covers real redraws by both parties and sticks to reported facts.

How to play

Paint: press on an empty square and drag to start a district. Press on a district and drag to grow it, including into a neighbour's squares. Fresh paint stops when a district is full.
Rules: every district needs exactly the same number of voters, and all its squares must touch edge to edge.
Erase: right-click, use the eraser, or press Delete.
Keyboard: focus the map, move with the arrow keys, press Space to paint the square with the selected district, hold Shift and use the arrows to drag, press 1–9 to pick a district.
Stars: one for meeting the goal, two for reasonably neat shapes, three for matching the compactness of the designer's hidden map without hints.

How the levels work

Apart from the three hand-built classic levels, each state is generated from a seed. The generator first splits the state into equal, connected districts by cutting random spanning trees, which is the same idea behind the "ReCom" method that researchers use to sample possible maps. It then places voters so that this hidden map meets the goal. So every level has at least one solution, and the hint button reveals one hidden district at a time.

Compactness is a Polsby–Popper score (4π × area ÷ perimeter²), rescaled so that a perfect square on the grid scores 100. The efficiency gap shown after each election is the difference in wasted votes between the parties, divided by all votes cast.

Real redistricting is far messier. It uses census populations rather than voters, counties and communities of interest, the Voting Rights Act, and voters who don't always vote the same way. The game simplifies all of that so you can feel the core mechanic.

Sources

Credits

Concept, code, levels and writing were made for this one-day site. Fonts: Fraunces and Space Grotesk from Google Fonts. No trackers, no accounts. Your stars and settings stay in your browser's local storage.

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