Wheel Spinner

What the wheel spinner does

A spinning wheel for names, prizes, choices or chores. Add your entries, press spin, and the wheel lands on a winner. It exists because a visible, theatrical draw is genuinely useful in front of an audience — a classroom, a livestream, a team meeting — where a plain result would land flat.

Underneath the presentation it is a rigorous draw: uniform by default, weighted if you choose, and able to pick several winners in one go or eliminate winners round by round.

The result is decided before the wheel moves

This is worth being explicit about. The winner is drawn first, using your browser’s cryptographic random source; the wheel then rotates to point at that already-chosen entry. The animation is a presentation of the result, not the mechanism that produces it.

That design has a practical consequence: turning the animation off changes nothing about fairness. The same draw happens either way, which is why the no-animation mode is a first-class option rather than a degraded fallback.

Every draw on this page starts with crypto.getRandomValues, the cryptographically strong random source built into your browser. That is a CSPRNG seeded from operating-system entropy: unpredictable in practice, and the right choice when a result decides something that matters. It is deliberately not described as “true randomness”, which would require a physical entropy source such as atmospheric noise or radioactive decay. Tools that claim true randomness from a browser are overstating what the platform provides.

Accessibility

Spinning animation is a problem for some people — vestibular disorders, migraine triggers, motion sensitivity — and a wheel that only communicates through movement excludes them entirely.

• No-animation mode shows the result immediately with no movement at all.
• Reduced-motion is respected automatically: if your device asks for reduced motion, the spin is disabled without you changing anything here.
• The winner is always text. It appears in large type and is announced to screen readers, so the outcome never depends on seeing the wheel.
• Colour is never the only signal. Segment colours are decorative; the winner is named, not merely pointed at.

Drawing several winners

Raise the winner count and the tool draws that many without replacement, so nobody wins twice. For a staged draw — announcing third place, then second, then first — use elimination mode: take the first winner, then paste the “Remaining entries” output back into the wheel for the next round. That produces a genuine sequence of independent draws from a shrinking pool, which is what a tiered prize draw actually is.

Weighted wheels

Write Entry | 3 and enable weights to make some segments more likely. This is common in promotional wheels and loot mechanics, and it is entirely legitimate — as long as it is disclosed. The tool shows an on-screen warning whenever weighting is active, because a weighted wheel is visually indistinguishable from a fair one.

Worked example

Six lunch options, one spin:

Entries   Pizza, Sushi, Tacos, Curry, Burgers, Salad
Method    uniform draw, 1 in 6 each (16.7%)
Winner    Curry

Practical uses

• Classroom participation — a visible, obviously impartial way to choose who answers.
• Livestream and event giveaways where the draw is part of the entertainment.
• Breaking decision deadlock in a team meeting when the options are genuinely equivalent.
• Chore and task allocation at home, where being seen to be fair matters more than the allocation itself.

Limitations

The wheel holds up to 500 entries, but readability degrades long before that — past about 20 segments the labels become decorative rather than legible, and a list-based picker communicates better. The wheel also does not persist between visits: if you need the same entries tomorrow, keep them somewhere yourself.

Privacy

Entries are processed in your browser, never uploaded, and never written into the page URL. That last point is deliberate: wheel entries are frequently people’s names, and a shareable link that carried them would leak participant lists to anyone the link reached.

Related tools

The Random Name Picker performs the same draw without the visual, which suits large lists. The Yes or No Generator handles the two-option case directly. For splitting people into groups rather than choosing one, use the Random Team Generator, and the List Randomizer produces a full running order.