🪜 Ladder Draw
Follow your line down. You cannot tell where it goes, and that is the point.
How to play Ladder Draw
- Each name starts on its own vertical line at the top.
- Walk down. Every time a rung appears on your line you have to take it, which shunts you sideways.
- In one winner mode, whoever lands on the 🏆 wins. In running order mode everybody gets a place, all at once.
- That second mode is the useful one: it assigns a whole group in a single draw — who does which chore, who buys for whom, who goes first.
Your list is shared across every game on Pickyroo — set it up once here and the wheel, the races and the bracket will all be ready to go with the same names.
Questions
What is amidakuji?
A Japanese drawing method — also called ghost leg — used for exactly this: assigning a group of people to a group of outcomes so that nobody can work out the result in advance. It is the ladder you see here.
Is scattering the rungs at random actually fair?
No, and that is why this does not do it. With sparse rungs a random ladder mostly leaves you under your own name, and it only approaches fair as the rungs get dense. So the destination is shuffled fairly first and the rungs are then built to produce exactly that shuffle — a permutation decomposed into adjacent swaps, which is all a rung is. Every path is traced through the finished ladder afterwards and the winner read off the picture, so what you see is always what happened.
Can I use this for secret santa?
Yes — that is what running order mode is for. Bear in mind it can assign somebody to their own position, so check the result before you commit.
Try another one
Same names, completely different result. See all twelve games →