On YouTube, you may have seen videos of "battle royale simulations" between different geographic areas like US states or countries where two locations are randomly selected and then then one is randomly "defeated" and their territory becomes part of the victorious location and then is repeated until there is only one state or nation remaining.

This simulation takes that concept and moves it to the next level, using county level entities in the United States.

The entities that are used in this game are the third-level administrative areas (where first level is country and second level is state) that are recognized by the United States Bureau of the Census as "counties".

In most states, these are considered the counties, or parishes as they are known in Louisiana. In Puerto Rico, they are the municipal boundaries ("municipios"). In some states, such as Virginia, Maryland, Missouri and Nevada also have third-level administrative areas that are associated with the municipality instead of the county (for example, Baltimore city and Baltimore County are two separate third-level entities. The District of Columbia is both a second-level and a third-level entity. Think of it as a state with only one county.

The CountyWar simulation will focus solely on the 48 continental United States and the District of Columbia. There are a total of 3,108 entities in this simulation.

The battle will start with one of the entities being randomly selected. This entity is known as the Attacker. Next, we will check to see which current entities are directly adjacent* to the attacking entity and then we randomly choose one of those. This entity is known as the Target.

We will then simulate a battle by randomly choosing a winner. Now, to assure that we give both sides a real fighting chance of victory, we randomize this process 9 times. When one side wins one of these nine fights, they will be awarded a hit point. The entity with the most hit points at the end of the nine fights will win the battle and take the land area that was held by the other combatant. All acquired land area will then turn into a single entity and will be at risk until the next time they are randomly chosen for a battle. Therefore, in subsequent battles, more land area is at risk, and as such the 3,108 entities that we started with will gradually reduce as some entities get extremely large.

This process will continue in rounds until only one county entity remains that has 100% of the US land area.

* - Two counties, Nantucket, MA and San Juan, WA are completely separated from other counties by water. In these two cases, we allowed the battle to go over the water to nearby counties within a reasonable distance. All other counties, such as those on peninsulas, will need to follow the land path for expansion.

To stir things up, specific rounds will be designated as "healing rounds". In these designated rounds, one of the captured county entities (from the original 3,108) will be randomly selected. That county entity will be broken out of the larger (capturing) entity and then will remain independent until the next time they are randomly chosen for battle. This gives these county entities a second chance for national conquest. Liberations add a twist to the simulation that will make it less predictable.

FREE PASS RULE: - In the event that either the attacker or the target achieves a perfect score of 9 hit points in a single battle, they will be given a "free pass" to the next battle round. This means that they will be automatically selected to attack, and they will automatically win the round. Hit points will not be recorded in free pass rounds and they will not be figured into averages. The Free Pass Rule does not apply in cases where a perfect 9 is scored but there are only 10 or fewer entities remaining in the current game. If the round following the achievement of the perfect score is a liberation round, the liberation round will take place as normal and the free pass will be conducted in the battle round following. The liberated entity will be in play for the free pass round. (Rule added for Game #2.)

STRENGTH THRESHOLD: - During each of the 9 fights in the battle, a random number between 1~100 is selected. The higher the number, the more in favor it goes to the attacker. Normally, the threshold between giving the victory to the attacker vs. the target is 50 (which gives each side an equal chance of winning). Based on historical average hit point values and the current population that the attacker controls, they can sway this threshold up to 20 in their direction. At the same time, the target can use their average hit points and population controlled to sway the threshold in their direction. Because the threshold can only sway 20 points away from 50 in either direction, there will always be at least a 30% chance that the underdog will be victorious.

CountyWAR starts a new game every Monday at 7AM Mountain Standard Time (MST, Phoenix, Arizona time). This means 9AM Eastern Standard Time or 10AM Eastern Daylight Time. It also translates to 14:00 Coordinated Universal Time (UTC).

Rounds are conducted once per minute. The rounds conducted at :00 and :30 in most hours are liberation rounds. Therefore, there are 58 battle rounds and 2 liberation rounds each hour. On Monday through Thursday, an "overnight cease fire" is delcared at 7PM MST and the battle will resume at 7AM MST the next day.

On Friday afternoons, we expect to have some very large entities already formed. The pace of the battles will decrease to once every 5 minutes until a single entity has captured the entire country and has achieved national conquest.

During simulation hours, clicking on the Refresh link at the top of the page will set the main page to refresh automatically once per monute. That way, you can leave the page up in a browser tab and check back in on occasion. Keep in mind, if you navigate off of the refreshing main page to another page on the CountyWAR site, you must reinstate auto-refresh by clicking on the Refresh link. Taking CountyWAR into auto-refresh mode will also prevent the display of ads. At the end of the battle day, it will stop auto-refreshing. So will have to manually reload the page the next morning.

The simulation tracks current leaders in the race to national conquest and ranks the top entities separately based on the most counties that are held by a single entity as well as the single entity with the largest population. The top 20 entities at the current time are listed on the leaderboard and depicted on the map with their boundaries in different colors. You may switch the leaderboard to show the top 20 entities based on population of the combined entity.

To see the specific status of an original county, you can click on the County List, choose your state and then county. You will see a map of the entire captured entity with the county being searched by the user highlighted.

There are folks out there, such as geography buffs who eat this kind of thing up. It's also a good way to pass time as you can watch the results come in and the maps change once per minute. This is much better than what we had in the 1970s when the signs at McDonald's would display how many billions of burgers they have sold. Our results update much more frequently than the old McDonald's signs. Plus, for whichever county wins the weekly game, they get to have bragging rights. And before anyone even thinks about suggesting this, we are in no way advocating for civil war. Not a good idea. Nothing political here. Just good clean fun in a controlled environemnt.

This simulation uses the database resources of REC Networks, one of the largest database operators that caters to the broadcast industry including stations, listeners, hobbyists, manufacturers and even the government. Platforms, such as simulation games like this allow us to test future functionality for our "regular" business tools. Plus, we can't be all serious, all the time. One of REC's slogans is "Entertain, Inform and Support". While some may find this simulation as entertaining as watching paint dry, CountyWAR does fall under the "entertaiment" category.

This is what the Fun and Games Department at REC Networks is all about.. to have fun. For more information on the serious stuff we do, visit RECnet.com or you can check our FCC Media Bureau dashboard site, fcc.today which, like this CountyWar simulator, autorefreshes frequently throughout the day and gives updated information on each refresh. But unlike CountyWAR, the information on FCC.today is the real thing.