Tom and Jerrymandering

gameplay capture
gameplay capture

Why did we make this?

With the 2024 Election coming up, the shortcomings of the American political system are once again put on full display. In particular, gerrymandering, the process by which a political party draws district lines such that they heavily favor one party, is an anti-democratic process that has managed to persist in America for nearly 200 years. Although Gerrymandering originated in the 19th century, it still remains unsolved topic to this day: most recently, there were SCOTUS rulings in 2023 that determined the congressional districts of Alabama were racial gerrymandered.

For these reasons, we decided to make this game to create an accessible and engaging medium to inform voters of this issue. We hope that this puzzle-style game is not only interesting, but encourages players to research the effects of gerrymandering once they finish playing. We know this is not the final end all solution to fix gerrymandering, but we hope that by educating voters we at least take a step in that direction. And what better way to teach someone about gerrymandering than forcing them to gerrymander for themselves!

What it does

Tom and Gerrymandering is a game where you must gerrymander your way to victory. For each map, you must draw a given number of districts such that the majority are Mozerellan without exceeding the "sus" threshold, which represents the liklihood that either the governor or the supreme court strikes down your proposed districts. If you manage to get your plan approved and gain congressional seats, you may be able to pass legislation to further your agenda!

How to Play

Controls:

Left click + drag: put a cell into a district. Starting in an unassociated cell will draw a new district. starting in a cell already associated with a district will extend that district

Double left click: remove cell from district

middle mouse: move camera

right click: pan camera

Gameplay:

You start the game in campaign mode, but I recommend switching to redistricting mode. For each map, there are a specific number of districts you must allocate. Each cell on the map has a distribution of voters: yellow cells have mostly mozzerellans, while purple cells have mostly gorgonzollans. With this in mind, try to draw districts such that there is a slight majority of yellow districts. When you draw a district, the border and tint will be yellow if the district is a mozzerellan district, or purple if its gorgonzollan. If you get stuck, switch to campaign mode, where you can spend some cheese to convert voters in an area to mozzerellan. Use your money carefully!

Also, make sure to avoid a high sus meter, which will deny your plan. This happens by overpacking, really long or small districts, underpacking, or any other unconventional methods. Gerrymandering inherently uses these kinds of districts, so you need to find a good balance!

Once you are all done, you can submit your plan and see if it passes! If it does, you'll pass some legislation and move on to the next level (which is harder!).

How we built it

React, Tailwind, Next, Javascript, Three-js, Vercel, and cheese 🪤

Challenges

We had a lot of difficulty along the way, much of it stemming from technical implementation. Constructing a game board that could efficiently check for valid districts and district association, and handle animations was very difficult. We ended up using a doubly-connected edge list to represent the game as a graph, which allowed for quick and efficient traversal and operations on the graph