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Rigged Wheel Spinner

Decide where the wheel stops before you spin it. Force one entry to win every time, or keep the wheel landing somewhere new while it quietly avoids the name you picked — then hide the controls so nothing on screen gives it away.

AlexBaileyChrisDanaEliFrankieGraceHarper

Press Spin to land on one of 8 entries.

Outcome

Fair — 8 entries, equal odds

8 on the wheel

Shuffling changes the wedge order but not the rig — it follows the entry you picked, not its position, so you can reorder the wheel in front of an audience.

Choose the outcome

Every entry has the same chance. Nothing is rigged.

Use it for pranks, teaching and rehearsed demos. Never for a real prize draw, giveaway or anything the people watching believe is fair.

A wheel that agrees with you

Every spinning wheel on the internet promises fairness. This one promises the opposite, and says so on the tin. You type a list, you tell it which entry should win — or which entry should never win — and it obliges, while looking exactly like the fair wheel it is built from. Same wedges, same slowing arc, same little burst of confetti at the end.

There are two rigs, and they are not equally useful. “Always lands on” is the obvious one and the weaker one: the third time the wheel produces the same name, the room works it out. “Never lands on” is the rig that actually holds up. The wheel lands somewhere different on every spin, the results look completely unremarkable, and yet one particular entry never comes up. Nobody audits a wheel for absences.

Two details make it usable in front of people. The controls collapse to a single unlabelled button, because a rigging panel visible on a projector is worthless. And the rig follows the entry rather than the wedge position, so you can shuffle or re-sort the list while everyone watches — which looks like the most transparent thing you could possibly do — and the same name still wins. Delete that name and the wheel tells you it has gone back to a fair spin instead of silently re-aiming at whoever took the slot.

The movement is not faked either. The wheel takes a different number of turns each spin and stops at a slightly different point inside the winning wedge rather than dead centre, because landing in exactly the same place is the one thing that would look wrong. It is the same spin engine the fair wheels on this site use, with one extra instruction about where to finish.

Nothing is stored. The list, the rig and the results all live in the page, no account is needed and reloading resets everything to a fair spin. Which brings us to the part worth being blunt about: this is a party trick and a teaching prop, and using it to run a draw that people believe is fair is not a clever hack, it is deception. There is a plain wheel spinner on this site with no rigging controls in it at all. If the outcome matters to anybody other than you, that is the one to open.

How to rig it in four steps

  1. Step 1

    Type your list

    One entry per line. Shuffle or sort it if you like — the wheel redraws as you type and the rig is not tied to wedge order.

  2. Step 2

    Choose the outcome

    Fair, always this entry, or never this entry. Pick the entry from the dropdown underneath.

  3. Step 3

    Hide the controls

    One press collapses the whole panel. What is left on screen is a wheel and a spin button, with nothing to give it away.

  4. Step 4

    Spin

    The rotations, the deceleration and the stopping point inside the wedge all vary, so no two spins look alike.

Two kinds of rig

Force a winner, or quietly exclude one entry while everything else stays in play. The second is far harder to spot.

Built to be hidden

The controls collapse to a single unlabelled button. A rig you cannot hide is a rig nobody can actually use.

Survives a shuffle

The rig follows the entry, not the slot. Reorder the list in front of your audience and the same name still wins.

Where the line is

A fixed wheel is fine when everybody in the room either knows or will be told, and when nothing turns on the result. It stops being fine the moment somebody makes a decision, hands over money, or enters something on the belief that the draw was random. That is the whole test, and it is not a difficult one to apply.

So: rigging the wheel to pick who does the washing-up, to make a magic trick land, or to keep a recorded demo on script is a prank or a performance. Rigging it to award a giveaway prize, allocate a shift, pick a competition winner, settle a bet or decide anything with money attached is fraud dressed up as a wheel. In many countries promotional draws are covered by consumer-protection or lottery law, and “the wheel chose” is not a defence when you chose.

There is also a middle case worth naming, because it is the one people actually run into: nudging a group decision that everybody is happy with anyway. If the six of you have been staring at menus for twenty minutes and five want the same thing, letting the wheel confirm it is harmless — as long as you tell them afterwards. The rule of thumb is that if you would be embarrassed to show the panel once the spin is over, you should not have used it.

For everything else, the fair wheel spinner has no outcome controls of any kind. It cannot be set to favour an entry, which is precisely what makes it the right tool when the result has to be defensible.

What people use a fixed wheel for

Pranks with friends

Let the wheel choose who buys the next round three times in a row, then show them the panel.

Magic and mentalism

A prediction in a sealed envelope needs the wheel to cooperate. This is the cooperation.

Rehearsed demos

Recording a walkthrough where the result has to match the script? Fix it once instead of re-shooting.

Teaching scepticism

Show a class that an interface can look perfectly random while being nothing of the sort.

Stage and improv

A scene that depends on a particular prompt coming up still needs to look spontaneous.

Nudging a group decision

When everyone secretly wants pizza, the wheel can agree with them. Say so afterwards.

Testing your own build

A known outcome makes it easy to check that whatever consumes the result behaves correctly.

Not for prize draws

Anything with money, entries or trust attached needs the fair wheel. This one would be fraud.

How rigged wheels get spotted

People are much better at detecting patterns in outcomes than at detecting anything wrong with an interface. Nobody inspects the wheel; they remember the results. So the way a fixed wheel gets caught is almost always the same: it produces the convenient answer too often, or too soon, or at the exact moment it was needed.

If you are performing with one, three things help. Spin fairly most of the time and rig only the spin that matters, because a run of genuinely random results is the best cover there is. Prefer the “never” mode, since an absence is invisible in a way that a repetition is not. And do not rig the very first spin of the evening — let the wheel establish that it behaves normally before you ask anything of it.

The flip side is the reason this page exists at all. A wheel that looks fair and is not is a good, small, physical-feeling demonstration of a much bigger idea: that you cannot audit a system from its interface. Recommendation feeds, shuffle buttons, matchmaking queues and ranking algorithms all present themselves as neutral machinery. Spin this wheel twenty times, conclude it is honest, then open the panel — the point lands much harder than being told.

More wheels and generators

Custom Wheel Spinner

The same wheel with no rigging controls at all — a genuinely fair spin.

Yes or No Wheel

A two-option wheel for decisions you want taken out of your hands.

Random Category Generator

Categories for quizzes, Scattergories and party rounds.

Truth or Dare Generator

Hundreds of prompts across four intensity levels.

Animal Wheel

A random animal from 307, filtered by group, habitat and region.

Random Food Wheel

Spin for something to eat when nobody in the group will decide.

Frequently asked questions

What does a rigged wheel spinner actually do?

It looks and behaves like an ordinary spinning wheel — same wedges, same slowing spin, same result card — except you have told it in advance where to stop. You can force it to land on one entry every time, or to avoid one entry while still landing somewhere different on each spin.

How do I rig the wheel?

Type your list, choose “Always lands on” or “Never lands on”, pick the entry from the dropdown, then press Hide everything before you present. The controls collapse and what remains on screen is an ordinary wheel with an ordinary spin button.

Which mode looks more convincing?

“Never lands on” by a wide margin. A wheel that produces the same name five times running is obvious to everyone in the room. A wheel that lands somewhere new each spin but keeps missing one name can run all evening without anybody noticing.

Does the spin still look random?

Yes. The number of rotations varies between spins and the stopping point is nudged slightly inside the winning wedge instead of landing dead centre, so nothing about the movement repeats. It is the same spin engine the site's fair wheels use.

What happens if I shuffle the list after rigging it?

Nothing breaks. The rig follows the entry you chose rather than its position on the wheel, so you can shuffle or sort the list in front of an audience — which is itself a decent way to make the wheel look above board — and the same name still wins.

What if I delete the entry I rigged?

The wheel goes back to spinning fairly and tells you why, rather than quietly picking whichever entry slid into that slot. Choose a name that is still on the list to switch the rig back on.

Can I use it for a real giveaway or prize draw?

No. Running a draw that people believe is random when you have fixed the result is deception, and depending on where you are and what is at stake it can be illegal — consumer-protection and lottery rules exist precisely for this. If the outcome matters to anyone but you, use a fair wheel.

So what is it legitimately for?

Pranks among friends who will be told, magic and mentalism routines, rehearsed stage or video demos where the outcome has to match a script, teaching people how easily a “random” draw can be faked, and testing your own software against a known result.

Is it a good way to teach scepticism?

It is one of the clearest demonstrations available. Let a class spin a wheel twenty times, let them conclude the wheel is fair, then show them the panel. The lesson that an interface can look random while being anything but tends to stick better than a lecture about it.

How many entries can I add?

As many as you can read. Labels shrink as the wheel fills and long names are shortened on the wedge, so somewhere around thirty is the practical limit for a wheel an audience is meant to follow.

Do you save my list or my rig?

No. Everything happens in your browser, nothing is sent to a server, and there is no account. Reloading the page clears the list and resets the wheel to a fair spin.

Can I go back to a fair spin?

Choose “Fair spin” and every entry has an equal chance again — or use the site's ordinary wheel spinner, which has no rigging controls at all and cannot be set to favour anything.

Will anyone watching be able to tell?

Not from the wheel itself. They can tell from the results if you overuse it: force one name repeatedly and the pattern gives you away. Rig sparingly, prefer the “never” mode, and let genuinely random spins do most of the work.

Is it free?

Free and unlimited, on phone or desktop, with no sign-up and nothing to install.

Use it honestly, please

This tool exists so that the outcome of a spin can be arranged in advance. It is meant for pranks among people who will be told, magic and stage routines, rehearsed demonstrations, software testing and teaching. It must not be used to run a prize draw, giveaway, competition, raffle, sweepstake, gambling activity or any allocation that the people affected believe to be random — misrepresenting a fixed result as a fair one may breach consumer-protection or lottery law where you live, and that is on the person spinning, not the wheel.

Nothing you type here is stored or sent anywhere; the whole tool runs in your browser and resets on reload. For a spin with no outcome controls of any kind, use the fair wheel spinner.

The site takes no responsibility for what anybody decides with a wheel, fixed or fair.