How Spin and Choose Works

This page explains the controls, exactly how a winner is chosen, what the odds are, and what the tool cannot promise. If you just want to spin, go back to the wheel.

Controls

• Wheel type buttons switch between the ready-made wheels and your custom wheels.
• Spin starts a spin. It is disabled while the wheel is turning and, on a custom wheel, until it has at least 2 entries.
• Reset clears the result, rotates the wheel back to its starting position and restores any entries you removed with "Remove this entry from the wheel".
• ✏️ next to the title renames the wheel. Built-in wheels can be renamed too; clearing the name restores the original.
• ⚙️ opens the theme chooser and the "Clear saved data" button.
• Keyboard: Tab moves between controls, Enter or Space presses a button, and every control shows a visible focus outline. Entries can be reordered with the ▲ and ▼ buttons, so dragging is optional.
• Reduced motion: if your device is set to reduce motion, the wheel does not animate and jumps straight to the result.

The ready-made wheels

• Eat Tonight has 12 cuisines. "Can't cook?" removes the ones that are awkward to order in (Pasta, BBQ, Salad and Steak), leaving 8.
• Watch Tonight has 12 genres, each with three example titles. A mood filter keeps only the genres tagged for that mood. The titles are examples; what is available depends on your region and changes over time.
• Truth or Dare uses two spins. The first picks Truth or Dare, the second picks a challenge at the intensity you chose. Dares come with an optional 60-second timer. The prompts are party-game style; choose what suits your group and skip anything you are not comfortable with.
• Travel has 12 destinations with best time to visit, three things to do and a one-line description. A budget filter keeps destinations that can be done at that level. The suggestions are general inspiration, not a booking guide.

Custom wheels

Create a wheel with New wheel and give it a name. Add entries one at a time or paste a list with one entry per line. Each entry has a name (up to 24 characters) and a colour. You can edit a name in place, change a colour, move an entry up or down, or delete it. A wheel holds 2 to 20 entries and you can save up to 30 wheels. Entry names are treated purely as text, so anything you type is shown as typed and cannot inject markup into the page.

How the winner is chosen

1. When you press Spin, the page asks your browser's cryptographic random number generator (crypto.getRandomValues) for a number and turns it into a position from 1 to n, where n is the number of entries currently on the wheel. Numbers that would make some positions slightly more likely than others (modulo bias) are discarded and drawn again, so every position is equally likely.
2. The wheel then animates to a final angle that sits inside the chosen segment, a little off-centre by a random amount so it does not always stop in the middle.
3. When the animation ends, the result shown comes from the same chosen entry, and the wheel's final angle is checked against it. What you see under the pointer is what the result says.

If your browser does not offer crypto.getRandomValues, the tool falls back to Math.random, which is fine for casual choices but is not designed for security.

The odds

There is no weighting and no hidden bias. Each entry has a 1 in n chance on every spin. The only way to change someone's odds is to add their entry more than once, because duplicate entries are counted separately.

Spins have no memory. The entry that just won is exactly as likely to win again as any other (1 in n), which is why streaks and repeats can happen. If everyone should get a turn, use Remove this entry from the wheel after each spin. Filters on the ready-made wheels change which options are on the wheel; the remaining options are still equally likely.

Limitations

• Spin and Choose is not a certified, audited or regulated random number generator. It has not been independently tested for randomness.
• Do not use it for lotteries, raffles, sweepstakes, prize or cash draws, gambling, or any selection where a law, regulator, contract or competition rule requires a verifiable or witnessed method.
• It cannot prove to other people what happened on your screen. If a group needs to trust the outcome, agree the rules first and watch the same screen.
• Your result depends on your browser and device working correctly. If a tab is closed or the page reloads mid-spin, the spin is lost.
• The ready-made lists are small, fixed and written by hand. They are suggestions, not recommendations or reviews.

Where your data goes

Entries, wheel names and the result are handled in your browser. Wheels you create, titles you rename and your theme choice are saved in your browser's local storage so they are there when you return; the Privacy Policy lists the exact keys. Use Clear saved data in the ⚙️ menu (or on the Privacy page) to delete them.