Spin the wheel
No spins yet. Winners are listed here in order.
Five starter wheels sit above the panel — names, food, movies, games, songs — and pasting your own list over any of them takes one line per entry. The wheel divides into equal segments, one per entry, and every spin picks a winner with equal probability from the entries still on it. Turning on "Remove the winner" takes each result off, so twelve spins work through twelve names without a repeat.
How to use it
Doing this in front of a room is the point, which is why the spin is slow and the winner appears in large type. Segment colours alternate between two tints of the page’s own accent instead of a rainbow, so the wheel stays legible on a projector and does not fight the rest of the page.
The five buttons above the wheel are the pages this one replaced, and each of them was a starter list rather than a different tool: a random person picker holding eight names, a random food picker with twenty things people actually cook, a random movie picker with twenty films, a shelf of twenty board games, and a dozen songs a room will sing. Switching between them replaces the wheel and clears the run, since a history of winners drawn from a list that has gone is a record of nothing.
What goes on the wheel after that is entirely yours: a class register, tonight’s shortlist of meals, the shelf of board games, the films you keep scrolling past, a playlist you want shuffled properly. The wheel knows nothing about any of them, which is the honest version of a recommendation. It will not quietly favour the entry it thinks you want, and unlike a streaming shuffle it does not spread results out to feel random. Every line has exactly the same slice, every time.
Most of the value is in handing the decision over, not in the randomness. Choosing between forty films is a genuinely hard problem, and the scrolling that goes with it is avoidance dressed up as deliberation. Deciding what to cook is hardest at the end of the day, which is precisely when it gets asked. A shelf of board games grows a long tail that never gets played, because a group under mild social pressure reaches for the familiar box every time. And if the answer makes you groan, that is information: spin again, but notice you now know what you actually wanted.
What people use it for
- Picking a name from a class register or a standup rota
- Settling what to eat tonight from a shortlist of meals
- Choosing a board game instead of staring at the shelf
- Ending the scroll and landing on a movie
- Shuffling a pasted playlist without a streaming service’s opinion
- Drawing a prize winner in front of a room
Questions
Yes. Clear the box and paste yours, one entry per line, and the wheel redraws as you type.
Only the names are: those eight exist so the page works the second it loads and are meant to be replaced by your own register. The other four are real starting points and worth spinning as they stand — twenty meals, twenty films, twenty board games and a dozen singalongs — though each gets better the moment you edit it down to what you actually cook, own or want to watch.
Yes, and it clears the run of winners with it. Pressing a starter button replaces the whole list, so paste your own over one rather than switching after you have edited it.
Yes. Each spin draws from the browser’s cryptographic generator over the entries still on the wheel. No entry is favoured and nothing is pre-decided.
A few hundred before the labels get too small to read. The draw itself is unaffected by the count.
Turn on "Remove the winner". Each result comes off the wheel, so a run of spins gives distinct answers until the wheel is empty.
Not in one spin — the wheel lands on one segment. Turn on removal and spin as many times as you need; the winners are listed in order underneath.
Not directly, but adding it twice doubles its share of the wheel, which is the same thing.
No. Nothing is stored between visits, so nothing needs deleting either. Keep your list in a note and paste it back.
No. It stays in this page, and so does the record of what the wheel has landed on.
Each line becomes one entry. Blank lines and stray spaces are dropped; extra columns from a spreadsheet stay as part of the label, so trim them if you want short segments.
Nothing at all. It cannot tell a film from a dinner, which means any line you type is a valid answer.
No. Paste only the entries that already qualify — the four games that fit tonight’s group, the films under two hours.
Turn on removal and spin five times. You get five different meals in order, and the run stays on screen.
Because it is not uniform. Services deliberately spread artists out and avoid quick repeats, since genuine randomness sounds clumpy. This wheel does not smooth anything.
No. The winner is chosen before the wheel moves. The animation exists so a room can watch, not to decide anything.
Yes. If your system asks for reduced motion, the wheel jumps straight to the result.
Use the yes-or-no wheel, which is the same draw locked to two segments.