Random Raffle Wheel

A raffle is not a giveaway

They look similar and they are not the same draw, which is why they have separate pages here.

A giveaway draws from a list of people. Each entrant is one name, and you usually want each person to win at most once. That is the giveaway winner picker.

A raffle draws from a book of tickets. One person can hold twelve tickets and each one is a separate chance. What you draw is a number, and you find out afterwards who is holding it. That changes what the tool needs to do: it has to take ranges of numbers rather than a list of names, the winning number needs to be legible from the back of a room, and a retired ticket needs to stay retired for the rest of the evening.

This page is built for the second one.

Entering ticket numbers

Tap a preset to load a common book — 1–50, 101–140, or the lettered A1–A30 — or paste your own numbers, one per line.

For a straight numeric run there is a faster route: build the range on the random number generator, which takes a minimum and a maximum, then copy the numbers across. Anything is valid as a ticket: A-114, RED-07, a name and a number together.

Keep the wheel under about 200 tickets. Beyond that the slices are too thin to read and the draw stops being watchable, which defeats the purpose of doing it on a wheel. For a large book, draw the block first and then the ticket within it — two spins, both visible, both fair.

Drawing prize by prize

Retire each ticket once it wins is on by default. Draw the third prize, that ticket leaves the wheel, draw the second prize from the remainder, then the first. The Winning tickets panel numbers each draw in order and Copy exports the lot with timestamps.

Working from biggest prize to smallest is the more common order; working upwards keeps the room's attention until the end. Either is fine — just say which one you are doing before you start.

If a drawn ticket holder is not in the room, decide the rule before the first spin. Redraw immediately, or hold the prize? Announcing that rule after an absent winner comes up looks exactly like changing the rules to suit somebody.

Running it in front of a room

• Fullscreen puts the wheel on the projector with nothing else on screen. The spacebar spins, so you can drive it from a clicker without touching the laptop.
• Turn the sound on. The ticking is doing real work in a room — it tells people something is happening without you having to narrate it.
• Set the spin to Dramatic in the wheel options for eight seconds instead of five. Longer than that and a room of a hundred people starts talking over it.
• Read the number twice. Once off the wheel, once off the result window, which stays on screen until you close it.