Washington Post: This family created a gerrymandering board game. Arnold Schwarzenegger was pumped.

One afternoon two summers ago, rising high school junior Josh Lafair was sitting around his kitchen table with older siblings Louis and Becca, trying — as they frequently did — to decide which board game they were going to play that day. They’d always been a board-gaming family (their favorite at the time was Settlers of Catan), but they’d also always been a political family, talking about elections and legislation around the dinner table with their mom and dad. That afternoon, the two interests would converge.

The Lafair family dinner table, you see, was in Texas’s 10th Congressional District, which comprises a little bit of Austin (where they lived), a little bit of the Houston suburbs, and a large swath of countryside in between. The gerrymandering of the 10th District is almost comically transparent: It goes to great lengths (literally) to submerge voters from two Democratic-leaning cities 160 miles apart into a conservative district represented by Republican Michael McCaul.

At the time, Josh wasn’t aware of the intricacies and history of gerrymandering. It had been a recent topic of discussion at one of those family dinners, and to Josh, it seemed bad — a way for politicians to rig their elections and bypass the will of voters. He also believed, as he and his siblings decided that afternoon, that it could make for a good game. “Scheming, strategizing, backstabbing — gerrymandering has all the right mechanics of a board game,” Josh told me. “Kind of unfortunately.”

Which is how, in March, Josh found himself outside the U.S. Supreme Court, teaching a long line full of tourists, activists, reporters and interns how to play his new board game. That day, the court was hearing oral arguments for two gerrymandering-related cases, and Josh and his family had flown up for the occasion to debut Mapmaker: The Gerrymandering Game.

“This is so much fun,” said Tim Ryder, who played Mapmaker at a table Josh had set up for people waiting to get into the court. The table was strewn with the game’s pieces: colored tokens representing the political parties that players can pick from, as well as thin black wooden rectangles that players take turns placing on the imaginary state’s hexagonal map. Players use these to gradually form borders, with the goal of distributing their voters in a way that will allow them to claim as many districts as possible. Whoever ends up with the most districts wins.

Ryder was playing against Sam Voorhees, who works on gerrymandering issues at Common Cause (one of the cases’ plaintiffs). “It shows you the strategies politicians use,” Voorhees said of the game. “Packing and cracking districts, trying to get all my opponents’ voters into a single place.”