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Prize wheel with visible odds

Type your prizes onto the wheel and give the rare one a smaller weight. The segments end up exactly as wide as the odds, so what somebody sees on the rim is what the draw actually does — no hidden multiplier, no house slice.

This wheel is already set up for the job. Open it in the editor to change the list, the machine or the odds.

Every spin draws from your browser’s cryptographic random source. How a draw is made sets out the method and its limits.

Open this wheel in the editor

How do the weights change the odds?

An entry’s chance is its weight divided by the total of every weight, and nothing else. Give the sticker eight and the weekend away one, out of a total of twenty, and the sticker comes up eight times in twenty while the weekend comes up once.

The rim is drawn from the same numbers, so the picture cannot disagree with the maths — a segment that looks like a twentieth of the wheel is a twentieth of the wheel. The percentage shown beside each prize is the same figure again.

Can I run one at a stand or an event?

That is what fullscreen is for. The wheel fills the screen, the controls disappear, and a tablet propped on a table becomes the whole stand. The tick and the chime are on a switch, which matters in a hall where every stand is making noise.

It keeps working with no connection once the page has loaded, which is worth more at a trade stand than it sounds: venue wifi is the thing that fails at eleven in the morning.

Prize wheel or raffle draw?

A prize wheel draws a prize for the person standing in front of it. A raffle draws a person from everybody who entered. They look identical and they answer opposite questions, which is why they are two pages.

If the same person may win the same prize twice, leave elimination off. Turn it on where the stock is one of each: the prize leaves the wheel when it is won, which is also how the wheel tells you that you are out of headphones.

What else is this wheel good for?

It is the name wheel with prizes instead of names, so weights and elimination behave exactly as they do there. Where the prizes are objects people recognise on sight, the picture wheel reads faster than a label.

Drawing the winner rather than the prize is a raffle draw. The same weights with nothing to win behind them make a probability spinner, where the odds are the lesson rather than the promise.

Questions about prize wheels

Yes — the wheel takes one centre image, and it travels with the wheel when you save or share it. It sits on the hub rather than over the segments, so it never covers a prize.

Six palettes and nine machines, and any pairing is allowed. Individual segments take a colour of their own as well, which is the usual way of making one prize obviously the big one.

Yes, and the arithmetic is the point: the draw sums the weights as whole numbers and picks one uniform integer from the total, discarding the values that would favour the first few segments rather than rounding them in. The fairness page explains why that discarding is not optional.

Yes. Duplicate labels are folded into one segment on the rim and counted properly in the odds, so a sticker listed twice is the same as a sticker with a weight of two — whichever is easier to type.