Pack all the Democrats in your area into your living room for this grand old party game! Gerry is Texas’ second congressional district, but he’s the first anthropomorphic congressional district to become the face of a Nintendo franchise! Meet the gerrymandered district shaped like an unstable canoe starring in your new favorite game about congressional district borders. Join Gerry as he meets other gerrymandered districts all over the country! From Elle Ectoraldistricts, North Louisiana’s second district; to Viola Tionofvotingrights, Pennsylvania’s seventh district, the list of Gerry’s new friends seems to never end! Seriously, there are a fucking ton of gerrymandered districts!
Your mission is to trace out the border of your new anthropomorphic district pal before you run out of voting obstruction measures that keep you in power! With every bill, your border can get longer and more convoluted! It’s the most intense iteration of Snake since the last US representative election in North Carolina! Maryland’s third district may seem easy (it’s not, Democrat-led legislatures draw wonky canoes too), but wait until you get to Illinois’s fourth! Are you skilled enough to trace it out before having to pass a bill prohibiting people from bringing jackets to the voting line?
Drawn in 2012 by a Republican- led legislature, Gerry looks like a banana that someone peeled upwards and then took a bite out of before they realized they don’t like bananas! If that doesn’t describe the shape of an arbitrary, fair portion of Texas’ population to measure, what does? Gerry looks like a tadpole that is performing a soliloquy on mortality because it swam out of water too soon. He looks like a snake that started swallowing an innocent mouse but can’t quite get it down without anyone noticing! Don’t worry, I’m sure someone will notice before the snake has disproportionate systemic power over a country!
If you draw Gerry, you’re going to have to get your redistricting line long enough to slip by northeast Austin so you can swallow several Democrat-voting communities in his hideously deformed body! But don’t worry about those Democrats coming along to ruin your fun, Gerry is represented by Republican Dan Crenshaw. Keep drawing those district lines! Draw them all night! Draw them until your mom turns off the lights in your room and tells you that you can’t let representatives choose their voters so their party can retain power, you have school tomorrow morning!
Play with Gerry and all of his friends when Gerry Mandering’s Long, Oddly-Shaped, Suspiciously Specific Adventure releases, exclusively on the Nintendo Switch (unless Sony challenges that in a federal court)!
Dan Kaliblotzky is a fourth-year at UCSD. He aspires to find a career in soulful heavy metal Phineas and Ferb covers.