About Pickyroo

Pickyroo turns a list of names into something worth watching. There are plenty of spinning wheels on the internet; there are not many places where the same list can be a horse race with daft jockeys, a bracket that plays itself out, or a row of balloons you pop one at a time until somebody is left.

It is free, there is nothing to sign up for, and it runs entirely in your browser. The site is paid for by adverts, which is why you will see reserved advert spaces around the edges — never on top of the game, and never in a position that shoves the page around while something is spinning.

How the randomness works

This is the part that matters, because "it picks a random name" is a claim, and claims should be checkable.

The random source

Every draw on this site uses crypto.getRandomValues() — the browser's cryptographically secure random number generator, the same one used for generating security keys. The usual choice, Math.random(), is not specified to be high quality: browsers are free to implement it with a fast generator that has detectable patterns and a limited period. For a name picker that difference will never bite you in practice, but it costs nothing to do it properly, and it means the claim on this page is literally true rather than approximately true.

Whole numbers without bias

Turning a random 32-bit number into "a number from 0 to 6" is where fairness usually quietly breaks. The obvious approach — take the remainder — is very slightly biased towards the low numbers whenever the range does not divide exactly into 2³². Pickyroo uses rejection sampling instead: numbers landing in the small unfair tail are thrown away and a fresh one is drawn. Every entrant gets exactly the same chance, not nearly the same chance.

Decided first, or genuinely simulated

The games split into two honest categories, and it is worth knowing which is which.

• Decided first, then revealed: the wheel, the slots, mystery boxes. The winner is drawn fairly before the animation starts, and the animation is solved backwards so it lands there. Doing it the other way round — spinning and reading off whatever it hits — would inherit whatever bias lives in the easing curve and the floating-point maths.
• Genuinely simulated: the four races, plinko, the dice derby and the bracket. Nothing is pre-decided; the simulation runs and whoever gets there first wins. Every entrant is drawn from the same distribution, so it is fair in exactly the way a real race is fair.

The one place this needs care is plinko. A ball dropped through a peg board lands in the middle far more often than at the edges — that is a Galton board, and its distribution is binomial rather than flat. So the bin labels are reshuffled before every single drop. The physics stays biased towards the middle, but nobody owns the middle, and each name's overall chance is exactly equal.

What the weight numbers do

Each name has a number beside it. Set it to 3 and that name gets three times the chance — but each game applies that in a way that fits the game rather than by fudging the result:

• Wheel: three times the slice.
• Plinko and mystery boxes: three bins, or three boxes, instead of one.
• Dice derby: rolls three dice and keeps the best.
• Races: a modest bump to baseline speed — a fancied runner, not a certainty.
• Bracket: wins any individual tie three times out of four against a weight of 1, which compounds through the rounds.
• Balloon pop: reversed, because the game is reversed — a weight of 3 is three times harder to pop. In an elimination game that is what someone setting a weight actually means.

What happens to your list

Nothing. It is kept in your browser's local storage so it is still there next time, and it is never transmitted anywhere — there is no account, no database and no server-side code on this site at all. Clearing your browser data clears it.

The 🔗 Share button packs the list into the part of a link after the #. Browsers never send that part to a server, so even a shared link only ever travels as far as the person you send it to. Full details are in the privacy policy.

Accessibility

Every game can be run from the keyboard — the space bar plays, Escape closes the results — results are announced to screen readers, and the whole site respects reduce motion if your device asks for it, which turns off the confetti and the fluttering. There is a light and a dark theme, and a full view mode that strips the page back to just the game for projectors and shared screens. If something is awkward to use, tell us and it will get fixed.

Who made it

Pickyroo is a small independent site built and run by one person in Ireland. It has no investors, no tracking beyond the advertising described in the privacy policy, and no intention of ever asking you to make an account.

Suggestions, bugs and requests for a thirteenth game: hello@pickyroo.com.

Last updated: 10 August 2026.