Gamehelpmapmaker

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, there are 55 counties, and with four, all 73 counties are played. Note that 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.

Gameplay

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 that 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. (eg. a Y-shaped district may not be splittable.)

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 (colored purple).