Spin the Wheel
Type your options, hit spin, and the wheel picks one. Every spin comes with a receipt you can share so nobody has to take your word for it.
One option per line. Paste a list straight in - it will handle it.
How to use the wheel
Type your options into the box, one per line, and press spin. The wheel redraws as you type, so you can see the odds change while you edit. Paste a list straight in from a document or spreadsheet and it will split on the line breaks for you.
Every option gets an equal slice. If you want one outcome to be more likely, add it twice - two slices out of ten is a one-in-five chance. It is a blunt instrument, but it is honest about what it is doing, which a hidden weighting slider is not.
Why a wheel works better than just deciding
Most decisions that end up on a wheel are not close calls that need more thought. They are decisions where every option is acceptable and the group has stalled on nobody wanting to be the one who picked. The wheel is useful precisely because it takes the choice away from a person, so there is nothing to defend afterwards.
The corollary matters: if one option on your wheel would genuinely annoy you, take it off before you spin rather than spinning again after. Re-spinning until you like the answer is just deciding slowly, and everyone at the table can see you doing it.
Is the spin actually random?
Yes, and you do not have to take our word for it. Before you spin, the page shows a hash of a secret seed. When the wheel stops, the seed is revealed alongside your result. Anyone can hash that seed to check it matches what was on screen beforehand, and re-run the draw to confirm the same list and the same seed produce the same winner.
That means the result cannot have been changed after the fact, and the seed cannot have been chosen to favour a particular entry. It does not prove the option list was complete - only whoever typed it in knows that. The full explanation is here.
The underlying numbers come from your browser's cryptographic random number generator, reduced to a slice index with rejection sampling. That last detail sounds fussy and is not: the naive approach of taking a random number modulo the slice count makes the first few slices very slightly more likely, and over a large giveaway that bias is real.
Common uses
- Picking where to eat when nobody will commit
- Choosing who does a chore nobody wants
- Classroom participation, so it is not always the same raised hand
- Picking a giveaway winner in front of an audience
- Breaking a tie in a group vote