About Daily District
Daily District is a free daily puzzle about American democracy: every day, one of the 435 U.S. House districts appears on the map, and your job is to figure out which one it is from its shape, its geography, and contextual clues.
What is Daily District?
Each day, every player around the world gets the same mystery congressional district. You study its outline and location clues, then narrow it down — first to a state, then to the exact district — in six guesses or fewer. Wrong guesses aren't wasted: each one tells you whether you're getting warmer or colder geographically, eliminating whole regions of the country as you go. (See How to play for the full rules.)
Behind the game sits a reference library: a profile page for every one of the 435 districts, with its current representative, Census demographics, recent presidential results, an interactive map, and shape statistics. Miss a puzzle and you can read exactly what makes that district distinctive — which is the point. Daily District is designed so that playing it, even badly, teaches you something about how the country is divided up.
Why congressional districts matter
The U.S. House of Representatives has 435 voting members, each elected from a single district. After every decennial census, those districts are redrawn — a process called redistricting — to reflect where people live. How the lines are drawn shapes who runs, who wins, and ultimately which party controls the House, which is why redistricting (and its abuse, gerrymandering) is one of the most consequential and contested processes in American politics.
Yet most Americans would struggle to draw their own district from memory, let alone recognize any of the other 434. Districts range from dense urban seats a few dozen square miles in area to rural districts larger than entire states; some are compact and intuitive, others snake across a map in ways only a line-drawer could love. Learning to recognize them — their shapes, their communities, their politics — is a surprisingly effective way to build real civic knowledge. That's the gap Daily District tries to fill, one district a day.
Who's behind it
Daily District was created through a partnership between Dr. Jonathan Cervas of Carnegie Mellon University and Jason Fierman of the Redistrict Network. It grew out of their shared work on redistricting: an interactive way to learn how congressional districts shape American democracy, built for curious people of all backgrounds — students, teachers, political junkies, and anyone who likes a good map puzzle.
The data behind the game — Census demographics, election results, district geometry — is documented in detail on the Data & methodology page.
Support Daily District
Daily District is committed to making civic education interactive, approachable, and fun. Donations to the Carnegie Mellon Institute for Strategy & Technology support research and help make educational projects like Daily District possible.
Daily District is also seeking sponsors and organizational partners to support ongoing updates and maintenance of the game. If your organization is interested in sponsoring or partnering with Daily District, please contact RedistrictNetwork@gmail.com.
Follow @daily_district_ on X (Twitter) for each day's puzzle and the latest updates.