Skip to the contentSpinRondo

Random team generator for a list of names

Put everybody on the rim and spin once per pick, sending each name to the next team in turn. Elimination is on, so a name leaves the wheel as it is drawn and nobody can land in two teams.

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 you split a list into teams with one wheel?

Spin once per player and give each name to the next team in turn: the first result joins team one, the second joins team two, the third goes back to team one. The rim empties as you go, so the wheel itself shows who is still unpicked, and the draw ends when there is nothing left to draw.

Three or four teams work the same way, you just count further before you come back to the top. If you would rather nobody watched the sides forming, spin the whole list first and read the session log afterwards: with two teams, positions one, three and five are one side and two, four and six are the other.

Why draw the teams instead of letting captains pick?

Because captains pick in public and in order, and the last name called learns something about themselves that has nothing to do with the game. Every PE teacher has a workaround for that moment and most of the workarounds are a draw of some kind. A wheel is the version that needs no cards, no hat and no preparation.

It also ends the argument about who arranged the sides. Nobody negotiates with a wheel that emptied itself in front of the room, and whoever organised the game stops being the person accused of stacking one team and becomes the person who pressed spin. That is worth more than the thirty seconds it costs.

How do you keep one team from getting all the strong players?

Draw in pots, the way a tournament does. Put the strongest handful on one wheel and everybody else on another, then alternate: one pick from the top wheel for each team, then work through the rest. It is two short draws instead of one, and the sides come out level.

The wheel knows nothing about ability, and weights cannot fake that knowledge either: a weight changes how often a name comes up, not which side it lands on. The judgement belongs in the pots, where it stays out in the open and somebody can disagree with it.

What else is this wheel good for?

It is the plain picker wheel with a list of names on it, so elimination, saving and sharing behave exactly as they do there. Once the sides exist and the question is who starts or which court they get, the number wheel answers it without another list to type.

Call one name and stop rather than emptying the rim, and the same list is a classroom pick. Keep spinning to the end without splitting the results, and the log is a running order.

Questions about drawing teams

Count further before you come back to the top. Decide the number of teams first, then send the first result to team one, the second to team two, the third to team three and the fourth back to team one. Nothing in the wheel changes: it draws one name at a time, and the counting is what turns the results into sides.

Say where the spare goes before the first spin, not after it. The common rule is that the extra player joins the team drawn last, which is the one place nobody can lobby for in advance. Announcing it up front is the whole trick, because the same decision taken after the draw looks like a decision about a person.

Yes. Open the Live panel, create a session and hand out the link: everybody who opens it sees the same wheel land at the same moment, because the draw runs on the server rather than on each device. Hosting a live session needs a free account and watching one needs nothing. A plain share link works too, but then each person spins their own copy and gets their own result.

The session log keeps the order the names came out in, with the time and a short draw id, and it exports as a file. It does not store the teams themselves, because the wheel never knew how you were counting them. Read the sides off the log or photograph the screen before you clear it.