How to use the Pinball Random Picker
- Enter participant names, one per line. You can also separate them with commas. You need at least 2 names and can enter up to 30.
- Press Start draw. Each ball is labeled with the first letter of a name and starts falling from the top. If two names share a first letter, the balls are numbered instead.
- The balls bounce left and right off the pins on the way down. As each one crosses the dotted finish line, its name is added to the Finish order list on the right.
- The draw ends when every ball has finished. Use Copy ranking to share the result in a group chat.
How does the pinball picker decide the order?
The pinball picker works like a real pachinko machine or Galton board. Balls drop through rows of evenly spaced pins, and they're ranked by the order they hit the bottom. Tooljip runs a simple physics simulation with gravity, ball-to-pin collisions and ball-to-ball collisions, and it updates every ball's position 120 times per second.
Each time a ball hits a pin, a small random wobble is added. That means two balls starting from the same spot will take completely different paths, so nobody can predict or rig the result.
Is this random order generator really fair?
Three safeguards keep the draw fair:
- Shuffled starting positions: The balls aren't lined up in the order you typed the names. Their starting spots are shuffled at random, so the first name on the list gets no advantage.
- Cryptographic randomness: Starting speeds and pin-bounce wobble come from random numbers generated with
crypto.getRandomValues. - Anti-stuck nudges and a time limit: If a ball gets wedged between pins, it's nudged loose. If some balls still haven't finished after 40 seconds, the remaining balls are ranked at random, so the draw always ends.
Use it for presentation order, chore rotas and prize draws
| Situation | How to use it |
|---|---|
| Presentation or interview order | Use the finish order as the speaking order |
| Prize draw | First finisher picks a prize first, then second, and so on |
| Chore or duty rotation | Assign this week, next week and later weeks by rank |
| Game turn order | Decide who goes first in board games, card games or karaoke |
If the outcomes are fixed, such as "winner" and "no prize," the ladder game is a better fit. If you need to split people into groups, try the team generator.
Ladder game, spinner wheel or pinball picker: which should you use?
| Tool | What you get | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| Pinball picker | A full ranking from first to last | Times when everyone needs a place in line, such as presentation order, queue order or prize ranking |
| Ladder game | Each participant matched one-to-one with an outcome | Fixed outcomes such as win or lose, role assignments, or who buys the coffee |
| Spinner wheel | One item picked from a list | Choosing a lunch spot, a forfeit or a single winner |
| Team generator | Names split into several teams | Sports days, group projects or picking sides for a game |
All of these tools use the same cryptographic randomness (crypto), so they're equally fair. Just pick the presentation that suits your group. Everyone can watch the balls fall together in the pinball picker, which makes it especially popular in online meetings with screen sharing.