What is Spin the Wheel?
Type in anything you're deciding between — restaurants, movie picks, chores, who goes first — and the wheel turns it into six or sixty colourful slices ready to spin. Under the hood it's a physics-style spin with real deceleration, not a coin-flip dressed up as a wheel, so every session feels a little different even with the same list. Switch modes depending on what you need: Normal for a clean one-shot pick, Elimination to knock out options one spin at a time until only a winner remains, Mystery if you want the slice labels hidden until the wheel stops, or Best of 3 to settle something that really shouldn't be settled by a single spin. Six ready-made presets cover the common cases — dinner ideas, yes/no, days of the week, card suits — so you can start spinning without typing a list at all. It's genuinely useful for classroom pick-a-student duty, raffle-style giveaways, and group decisions where everyone needs to agree the process was fair — and it's just as good for lower-stakes chaos, like deciding who does the dishes.
Making a wheel the group actually accepts
Most arguments about a random pick are not about randomness. They are about process. The wheel settles them only if everyone agrees on the list before it turns, so build the full list first, read it out, and let people object then rather than afterwards.
Spin once. The temptation to go best of three appears the moment someone loses, and re-spinning after seeing a result is the single fastest way to lose the group's trust in the whole exercise. If you genuinely want multiple rounds, say so before the first spin, not after.
This is why it works in a classroom or a stand-up: the teacher or lead is visibly not choosing. Whoever the wheel lands on, nobody can argue the person running it had a favourite.
Every slice has the same chance, whatever it looks like
A common assumption is that a slice showing a longer word, or one that happens to sit at the top, comes up more often. It does not. The wheel divides a full circle by the number of items, so with eight items each slice is exactly one eighth, and the winner is drawn as a number between one and eight before the animation even starts. The spin you watch is the result being shown to you, not the result being decided.
That also means adding an item changes everyone's odds. Going from four options to five drops each one from a one-in-four chance to one-in-five — obvious when stated, easy to forget when someone asks to be added at the last second.
How to make one option more likely on purpose
Sometimes you want uneven odds: a raffle where someone bought three tickets, or a chore rota where one person owes a turn. The wheel has no weighting control, but you do not need one — add the same item more than once.
Enter a name twice on a ten-slice wheel and it holds two of the ten slices, so it comes up twice as often. Three entries out of twelve is a one-in-four chance. It is crude and it is completely transparent, which is the point: everyone can count the slices and see the odds for themselves, which is more than can be said for a hidden weighting setting.
Working through a whole list without repeats
Picking one name is easy. Getting through every name exactly once — presentation order, who goes first at each round of a game, assigning tasks — is where a plain random pick falls down, because it keeps handing you people who already went.
That is what Eliminate mode is for. Spin, and the result gives you a button to drop that item from the wheel before the next spin. Keep going and the wheel empties out, giving you a full running order with no duplicates and no crossing names off a list by hand.
Mystery mode is the opposite kind of tool. It keeps every label hidden until the wheel stops, so nobody watches their own name creep toward the pointer. It is worth using when the outcome matters to the people in the room and you want the reveal to land all at once.
Best of 3 is for the head-to-head. It unlocks only when the wheel is down to two names, then spins three times on its own and gives the series to whoever takes two of the three rounds. Deciding on three rounds before the first spin rather than after a result you did not like is the whole point — the mode exists so nobody has to ask for the re-spin.
Starting without typing a list
Six presets load with one tap and cover the decisions that come up most: what to eat, a yes/no answer, days of the week, numbers one to six, card suits, and a set of vibes. They are editable once loaded, so the dinner list is a starting point you can strip down to the three places that actually deliver to you.
For a longer list, the bulk import button takes a whole block of text and turns each line into its own slice, which is faster than adding thirty classmates one at a time. Whatever you build is gone when you reload the page, so a list you will want again is worth keeping somewhere else.