Decision Wheel

What this tool does

The Decision Wheel turns a list of choices into a colourful spinning wheel and picks one for you at random. Type your options — one per line — build the wheel, and press Spin. The wheel rotates with a smooth animation and slows to a stop with the chosen option under the pointer at the top. It is a friendlier, more visual alternative to flipping a coin or shuffling slips of paper, and it makes the moment of decision feel a little more fun.

Importantly, the result is decided fairly before the animation begins. The spin you watch is just presentation; the underlying pick uses your browser’s cryptographic random generator so every segment is equally likely. The animation length and number of turns vary slightly each time, so two spins never look quite the same.

Use cases

A decision wheel is for the small choices that do not deserve a long debate but still need to be made. Use it to settle where the team goes for lunch, who presents first, which task gets done next, or which film to watch tonight. Parents use it to choose chores or pick which child goes first without an argument. Teachers spin it to select a student, a topic or a group. Game nights use it for forfeits, prompts and turn order. Anyone running a giveaway can load the entrant names and spin for a winner in front of an audience — the visible, animated draw makes the outcome feel transparent.

The remove-after-win feature widens its use further. Spin, remove the winner and spin again to produce a complete random ranking — a draft order, a queue, a bracket seeding — one pick at a time.

How to use it

1. Type your options into the box, one per line. You need at least two.
2. Press Build wheel. Each option becomes a coloured segment.
3. Press Spin. The wheel turns and lands on a random option, which is then announced below the wheel.
4. To narrow things down, press Remove on the winning option and spin the smaller wheel again.
5. Edit the options and press Update wheel to rebuild, Load sample to try an example, or Reset to clear everything.

If you would rather not watch the animation, untick Animate the spin for an instant result — the pick is just as fair.

Privacy & your data

The Decision Wheel runs completely in your browser. The options you enter are held in memory only while the page is open; they are processed by JavaScript on your own device to draw the wheel and choose a winner. Nothing is sent to a server, nothing is written to storage, and there is no account or history. When you reload the page or close the tab, your options and results are gone. If your choices include private names or sensitive details, that information never leaves your computer, so there is nothing to clear afterwards.

Tips

For the clearest wheel, keep labels short — a word or two reads best on a segment, and long entries are trimmed with an ellipsis on the wheel face even though the full text is used in the announcement. If you have many options, expect smaller slices; the pointer at the top still marks the winner precisely.

Use the remove-after-win flow whenever you need an order rather than a single pick: each removal rebuilds the wheel, so the running order is generated fairly step by step. To weight a choice, list it more than once — an option that appears twice gets two segments and twice the chance of winning. And if you are sensitive to motion or simply in a hurry, the reduced-motion behaviour and the animation toggle both give you an instant, equally fair result.