Randomizers & Games

About Randomizers & Games

Random pickers are for decisions that do not deserve a discussion: who goes first, which restaurant, which name comes out of the hat. Doing it visibly — a wheel that spins, a coin that flips, dice that roll — matters more than the number itself, because everyone watching accepts the result in a way they would not accept a figure that simply appeared. Each tool draws from your device's own randomness. For anything where the outcome is worth money or secrecy, use a generator built for that purpose rather than a game.

The visible ones and the plain number generator do the same job for different audiences. A wheel is worth the three seconds of spin when other people are watching and need to see it was fair; a number generator is the right tool when you are picking alone and the animation is just delay. Dice and coins sit in between, and mostly get used because the physical ones are in another room.

One thing worth being clear about: results here are independent, exactly like the physical objects they imitate. A coin that has come up heads five times is no more likely to come up tails on the sixth, and a wheel does not remember what it landed on last. If you need every option to come out exactly once, you want a shuffled list rather than repeated draws — repeated draws will give you the same answer twice long before they give you all of them.