Spinner Wheel / Random Picker

Spinner wheel: build a wheel of your own options and let it decide

A spinner wheel is a decision device. You give it the choices — anything you can type, one per line — and it picks one for you. This one draws your options as coloured segments on a wheel, spins for about four seconds, and stops with the chosen segment under a fixed pointer, then shows the result in large type over the page. From there you can spin again, or drop the option you just landed on and spin what remains.

The choices do not have to be names. They can be restaurants, homework topics, workout stations, board games, film genres, code-review reviewers, chores, conversation prompts, prize tiers, or the four things on a to-do list you have been circling all morning. The wheel does not care what the text means; it only cares how many lines there are.

Nothing you type is uploaded. The segments are drawn on a canvas in your browser, the choice is made in your browser, and the tool never sends your options anywhere. There is no account, no saved wheel and no upload step.

Building a custom wheel

The wheel starts loaded with eight sample entries so it is spinnable on arrival. Clear the box and type your own, one option per line. The wheel redraws as you type — every keystroke resizes the segments — so you can see the shape of the decision forming.

• One line, one segment. Empty lines are dropped and surrounding whitespace is trimmed, so pasting a column from a spreadsheet or a bulleted list from a chat generally works without tidying.
• Two options is the minimum that is interesting. With one line the wheel is a single full-circle segment and always returns that answer; with none, the wheel greys out and the spin button is disabled until you add something.
• Keep option text short. Labels are drawn along each segment and get smaller as the list grows, and anything long is cut with an ellipsis. “Thai” reads at a glance; “that Thai place near the station” does not. The full text is always shown in the result panel, so shortening the label costs you nothing.
• Colour is decorative. Segments cycle through a twelve-colour palette, so a thirteenth option reuses the first colour. Colours carry no meaning and no weight.
• Spin from anywhere. The button spins, and so does clicking the wheel itself — useful on a touchscreen or a projected display.

Writing options that produce a usable answer

The quality of a wheel is decided before you spin it. A few habits that make the result actually actionable:

• Make every option one you would accept. The wheel is only useful if you will live with any segment. Options you would re-spin should not be on the wheel at all.
• Keep the options at one level. A wheel reading “pizza / Thai / cook something / eat out” mixes specific dishes with whole categories, and the categories will just send you to a second decision.
• Put an escape hatch on it if you want one. Adding a “you choose” or “skip this round” segment is legitimate, and unlike a silent re-spin it is visible to everyone in the room.
• Trim options rather than adding them. A forty-segment wheel is unreadable and, more importantly, means the decision was never really narrowed. Ten is a comfortable ceiling for a wheel people are watching.

Is the wheel fair, and is it weighted by segment size?

The wheel is unweighted, and every segment is exactly the same size. There is no control for making one slice bigger, and there is nothing hidden in the animation that favours an outcome. It is worth being precise about why, because a spinning picture invites suspicion.

The tool picks the winning segment first and animates second. When you press spin, it immediately selects one position from your list at random, then works out the rotation that will park that segment under the pointer — five full turns for show, plus the fraction needed to land it — and eases the wheel to a stop along that path. Nothing about the animation feeds back into the result. There is no simulated friction and no momentum, so how hard or fast you click changes nothing, and the angle the wheel came to rest at last time has no bearing on the next spin.

Because the choice is made over list positions rather than over angles, geometry cannot skew it either. Each of your n options has a one-in-n chance, every spin, independently of what came before. The random numbers come from the browser’s own built-in generator, which is unpredictable enough for deciding dinner, assigning a chore or running a game night, but is not a cryptographic or audited draw — do not use it as the mechanism of record for a regulated prize promotion.

That last column is the reason repeated results feel wrong when they are not. Spins are independent, so runs and repeats happen; on a five-option wheel the same segment coming up twice in a row is a one-in-five event, which is to say it is ordinary.

How to weight a spinner wheel

There is no slider for probability, but there is a mechanism, and it is exact: repeat a line. The tool draws over list positions rather than over unique labels, so a duplicated option genuinely occupies two segments and genuinely has two chances. Both slices are drawn on the wheel and either can win.

A worked example. Suppose Friday night should lean towards staying in, but takeaway and going out should stay possible:

Six lines, six equal segments, and the odds you wanted. The rule is simply that an option’s probability is its number of lines divided by the total number of lines — so to give something a one-in-ten chance against a favourite, type the favourite nine times. The cost is visual: the wheel will show the same label on several adjacent slices, sometimes in different colours, which is either a helpful picture of the weighting or clutter depending on your audience.

The flip side is that accidental duplicates weight the wheel without telling you. If a list was pasted twice, or merged from two sources, the wheel is quietly biased. Scan for repeats before you spin anything that matters, and use the entry count under the box as a check — if it is higher than the number of distinct options you meant to type, something is on there twice.

Spinning down a list instead of spinning repeatedly

The result panel offers two ways forward. Spin again redraws from the full wheel, with the option you just landed on still on it. The second button removes that option and spins what is left — the line is deleted from the entry box, the wheel redraws with one fewer segment, and that choice cannot come up again.

That turns a decision wheel into an ordering device. Spin a wheel of presentation topics and remove each as it is claimed and you have a running order. Spin a wheel of workout stations, removing each one, and you have a circuit. Because removal is nothing more than an edit to the text box, it is undoable: type the line back and the segment returns. If an option appears twice, removing it takes off one copy and leaves the other.

For lists of people specifically, a name wheel and a name picker built on this same spinner are set up for rosters rather than options.

What a spinner wheel is good for

Breaking a decision deadlock

Some decisions are not worth the deliberation they attract — which of four equally fine restaurants, which chore to start with, which of three good titles. A wheel does not make a better decision than you would; it makes the same-quality decision instantly and moves the conversation on. If the wheel lands somewhere and you feel disappointed, that feeling is information: you had a preference, and now you know it.

Games, parties and icebreakers

Build a wheel of dares, questions, categories or point values and spin it on a shared screen. Because segments are equal and unweighted, a wheel of point values pays out fairly by construction — if you want a rare jackpot, use the duplication trick to stack the common values instead.

Classroom and training activities

Spin for the next topic, the next vocabulary word, the next problem type, or which group presents. Options can be swapped out between rounds without reloading, so a wheel can shrink over a lesson as topics get covered.

Randomised routines

Practice schedules, reading orders, warm-up drills, prompt selection for writing or drawing. A wheel that is spun rather than chosen prevents the drift towards the exercises you already like.

Saving and sharing a wheel

Wheels are not saved. The options live in the page only while it is open, so reloading, closing the tab or navigating away resets it to the sample entries. Nothing is written to your browser’s storage, nothing is stored on a server, and the options are not encoded into the page address — which means sending someone the link sends them the tool, not your wheel.

That is the honest trade for the privacy behaviour: a tool that never stores your options cannot restore them later. Keep the source list wherever you already keep text — a note, a document, a pinned message — and paste it in. For a wheel you use often, that master copy is more useful anyway, since it is editable and shareable in a way a wheel is not.

Troubleshooting

• Spin is disabled. There are no non-empty lines in the box. The wheel shows a grey circle prompting for entries.
• Labels are truncated. Long option text is shortened on the wheel face as the segment count rises; the result panel shows it in full.
• The same option keeps winning. Check for duplicate lines, which really do multiply an option’s odds. Otherwise it is normal clustering — see the miss-probability table above.
• Two segments share a colour. The palette repeats every twelve segments. It has no effect on the outcome.
• The wheel reset itself. The page reloaded. Nothing is stored, so the sample entries come back.