Challenge: Ugliest possible borders/map of Europe that is still plausible

I think everyone has a problem with borders that involve an idiot with a ruler that has no idea what's going on at the region of which he is drawing the borders. For when they kinda sorta work and still look butt ugly, see American States. For when they work for jack shit, cause more problems than they solve, and also look ugly, see Africa and Middle East.

If your border cuts a town in a way that makes some poor schmuck require a passport to go to the kitchen, you are doing something wrong.

To be fair, straight borders isn't as much of a problem in North America when most of them aren't national borders, save one really, really long one. That said, sucks to be the odd US town which was missed and thus need a passport to pass through Canada to get to the mainland. Or Alaska.
 
To be fair, straight borders isn't as much of a problem in North America when most of them aren't national borders, save one really, really long one. That said, sucks to be the odd US town which was missed and thus need a passport to pass through Canada to get to the mainland. Or Alaska.

Not much of a problem today, but states did almost come to blows over the odd strip of land a couple of times, if I remember correctly.
 
Have the godawful crime against humanity we know of as Lotharingia survive

TReat-of-Verdun-320x249.jpg
 
In 1914 Europe is replaced with Europe from a virgin Earth and is colonized by the US. Straight-line borders. Straight-line borders everywhere.
 
Change it up. Instead of squares, make all countries triangles. Lots And lots of triangles. :winkytongue:
 
I think everyone has a problem with borders that involve an idiot with a ruler that has no idea what's going on at the region of which he is drawing the borders. For when they kinda sorta work and still look butt ugly, see American States. For when they work for jack shit, cause more problems than they solve, and also look ugly, see Africa and Middle East.

If your border cuts a town in a way that makes some poor schmuck require a passport to go to the kitchen, you are doing something wrong.
Isn't that the case with both the Dutch-Belgian and the Indian-Bangladeshi borders? Just those two are enclaves on enclaves on enclaves?
 
To be fair, straight borders isn't as much of a problem in North America when most of them aren't national borders...

Well, the reason they work in North America (or at least in the US) is that for any practical purpose there is no underlying local culture. The locals were stomped into the dust, so all that really mattered was what the conquerors wanted. They could move in and impose whatever borders they liked, and then local politics would conform to them rather than the other way around.
 
I think everyone has a problem with borders that involve an idiot with a ruler that has no idea what's going on at the region of which he is drawing the borders. For when they kinda sorta work and still look butt ugly, see American States. For when they work for jack shit, cause more problems than they solve, and also look ugly, see Africa and Middle East.

If your border cuts a town in a way that makes some poor schmuck require a passport to go to the kitchen, you are doing something wrong.
To be fair, the lines in the US were usually in unpopulated areas and most states use rivers or mountain ranges for a lot of their boundaries. Idaho used gave up about a third of their land to Montana and Wyoming so they only kept the land to the west of the Continental Divide and Massachusetts gave up a tiny tract of land on the opposite side of mountains to New Hork because they couldn't police it. Delaware has some odd boundaries though I would say, especially given that's the north is based on a semi-circle. As for Africa and the Middle East, I think most of the lines are in the desert and it took some time after independence for borders to be settled. Amazingly what happened with Winston's Hiccup, where Jordan wanted more of a coastline so traded the red in the below map for the green.

553px-Jordan_frontiers-en.svg.png
 
I always love how in maps of the HRE, there will be a godawful mess of bordergore and overlapping polities and then there’s just Bohemia, sitting there being a contiguous, compact little blob, no matter what era the map is from.


Obviously, Bohemia missed its chance to overrun Europe, a little piece at a time.
 
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