12 Number Wheels You Can Spin Right Now
Twelve wheels covering the ranges people actually draw from, from a two way split up to a hundred ticket raffle.
| Wheel | Slices | Chance per spin | What is on it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 or 2 Spinner Wheel | 2 | 50.0% | 1, 2 |
| Numbers 1 to 3 Wheel | 3 | 33.3% | 1, 2, 3 |
| Numbers 1 to 4 Wheel | 4 | 25.0% | 1, 2, 3, 4 |
| Numbers 1 to 5 Wheel | 5 | 20.0% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 |
| Numbers 1-6 Spinner Wheel | 6 | 16.7% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 |
| Numbers 1 to 8 Wheel | 8 | 12.5% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
| Numbers 1 to 10 Wheel | 10 | 10.0% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
| Numbers 1 to 12 Wheel | 12 | 8.3% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
| Numbers 1 to 20 Wheel | 20 | 5.0% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
| Numbers 1 to 30 Wheel | 30 | 3.3% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
| Numbers 1 to 50 Wheel | 50 | 2.0% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
| Numbers 1 to 100 Wheel | 100 | 1.0% | 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and more |
When to use a number wheel
A number wheel does one job: it turns a range into a visible, public draw. That sounds trivial until you try to do it in your head. People are famously bad at behaving randomly. Asked for a number between one and ten, we overpick seven and avoid the ends, and asked to shuffle a list mentally we keep the order we already had. A wheel has none of those habits, and just as importantly, everyone in the room watches the pointer land instead of taking your word for it.
The single most common mistake with a number wheel is using a range that is bigger than the thing you are drawing from. If you sold 63 raffle tickets and spin the one to one hundred wheel, roughly a third of your spins land on a ticket that does not exist and you have to spin again, which quietly makes the draw look rigged to anyone watching. Pick the closest range and then trim the list in the entry box to your exact count. Every wheel on this site is editable, so going from 100 slices to 63 takes one edit and the odds rebalance instantly.
Which range to reach for. The one or two wheel is a numbered coin flip for either-or picks. One to three, one to four and one to five are for small groups deciding who goes first, who cooks, or which of a handful of options wins; they are faster than dealing cards and less loaded than a nominated volunteer. The one to six wheel is a stand-in for a six sided die and gives exactly the same odds, which makes it useful at a cafe table or on a car journey where a real die ends up under a seat. One to eight covers lanes and brackets, and one to twelve covers clock hours, months and the d12. One to ten, one to twenty and one to thirty are the classroom sizes: calling on a seat or register number, choosing a question, setting a drill order. One to fifty and one to one hundred are the draw sizes, for numbered tickets, comment picks and seat raffles.
The trade-off at the top end is legibility. A hundred slices means each one is 3.6 degrees wide, which is thinner than most labels can be rendered. The wheels handle that by thinning the labels above roughly thirty entries and showing the winning number large after the spin, so the result stays readable on a projector even when the rim does not. If you need to read every value on the rim while it turns, use a range of twenty or fewer.
One thing a number wheel does not do is remember. Each spin is independent, which means a number is never due. If the one to six wheel has not landed on four for twelve spins, the chance of a four on the thirteenth spin is still exactly one in six. That is worth saying out loud in a maths lesson, because the opposite intuition is one of the most durable misconceptions about probability there is.
Other categories
None of these quite right? Build your own on the custom spinner wheel, or see all wheels in one table. Every wheel draws from the same tested randomness source.