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).