🎡 Wheel of Fortune
Enter options, spin the wheel, and let fate decide!
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📊 Statistics
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From Carnival Midways to Your Browser
Prize wheels descend from the "wheel of fortune" of medieval iconography — Fortuna spinning humanity up and down — by way of carnival midways and casino big-six wheels, before television made the format famous. The mechanics have always been the same trick: a visibly fair random draw dressed up as theater. The pointer, the tick-tick-tick deceleration, the near-miss on the grand prize — none of it changes the odds, all of it changes the experience.
This digital version keeps the theater but fixes the physics: the winning angle is drawn from the browser's cryptographically secure random source before the animation starts, and the decelerating spin simply performs the predetermined outcome. Every segment's chance is exactly its share of the 360° — no worn bearings, no sticky pegs, no "muscle memory" spins.
Weighting Without Settings: Repeat the Entry
The wheel splits its angles equally among input lines, so an option entered three times is three times as likely. That makes a giveaway configuration trivial:
| Entries | Probability |
|---|---|
| Grand prize × 1 line | 1/10 (10%) |
| Runner-up × 2 lines | 2/10 (20%) |
| "Thanks for playing" × 7 lines | 7/10 (70%) |
Pad the list to a round total (10, 20, 100 lines) and the math stays legible to everyone watching. For drawings from a name list, delete each winner and hit Update before the next spin — the history panel doubles as your audit trail.
The Real Trick: Spin It to Find Out What You Want
For low-stakes choices — lunch, movie night, which chore first — the wheel's best feature is psychological. There's an old observation about flipping a coin for a hard decision: the moment it's in the air, you suddenly know which side you're hoping for. The wheel stretches that moment to five suspenseful seconds. Watch your own reaction as it slows: if you're rooting for a segment, that's your answer, and you're free to overrule the wheel — it already did its job by surfacing the preference you couldn't articulate.
And when you genuinely don't care? Accept the result. Offloading trivial choices to a randomizer is a legitimate defense against decision fatigue — spend the willpower where it matters.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the spin actually fair?
Yes — the landing angle comes from crypto.getRandomValues, so each segment's probability is exactly its angular share, independent of every previous spin. The statistics panel converges to the theoretical odds over many spins; verify it yourself.
Why is there no "remove winner automatically" or re-spin button?
Deliberate minimalism: for real giveaways you should announce the rules before spinning, and removing winners is a one-line edit plus Update — visible to the audience, which is the point. A re-spin button mostly exists to overrule results, which defeats a randomizer.
How many options can it hold?
No hard limit, but past ~20 entries the segment labels get small. For big decision trees, spin in two rounds — categories first, then items. The winning entry is always displayed full-size after the spin regardless.
Are my entries uploaded anywhere?
No — drawing, spinning, and statistics all run in your browser. Refresh and everything is gone.