Who gets which prize? Let chance decide — and show your work

The raffle at the school fundraiser went beautifully — five winners drawn, five prizes on the table. Then came the part nobody planned: the prizes aren't equal. There's a €50 gift card, a decent bottle of wine, a board game, a mug, and a sticker pack. The moment a human decides who gets which, the draw stops being random. The organiser's friend gets the gift card and everyone notices; give it to the loudest complainer and you've taught people to complain. The fix is to make the second decision exactly as random as the first — match people to prizes in one shuffle that nobody controls.

Two lists in, one pairing out

The random prize assigner takes exactly the situation above: one list of people, one list of prizes or tasks, one per line in each box. Click assign and it shuffles the prize list with an unbiased Fisher–Yates shuffle, then pairs it against your people — every person walks away with a prize, and every possible matching was equally likely. The result appears as clean person-to-prize cards you can read aloud in prize order, plus a copyable text version to paste straight into the group chat, so the announcement and the record are the same thing. Both lists stay saved in your browser between visits, which matters more than it sounds: the annual fundraiser's prize table is largely the same every year, and next time you'll only be editing names.

More people than prizes? Decide the rule before the draw

The lists rarely come out even, and what happens next is a rule you should pick — openly — before anyone's name is on the table. With the default settings, when people outnumber prizes the tool cycles back through the shuffled prize list, so twelve guests and four prizes means each prize is handed out three times. That's the right shape for goodie-bag tiers or task rotas, where "prizes" repeat naturally. Tick allow repeats instead and each person draws independently from the full prize list — the same prize can land any number of times and some prizes may not be drawn at all, which suits digital rewards like discount codes where supply isn't the constraint. And when prizes outnumber people, the leftover prizes simply go unassigned — spares for the next event, or fuel for a bonus round. None of these rules is more or less fair than another; what breaks trust is choosing the rule after seeing who won.

The seed box is your transparency lever

For casual draws, pure randomness is fine. But when the prizes have real value, the organiser faces an awkward structural problem: the person running the draw is often in it. Re-click enough times and eventually you land on an assignment you like — nobody would know. The seed option removes even the possibility. Type any phrase into the seed box — "SummerFete2026" — and the assignment becomes deterministic: the same lists plus the same seed always produce the same pairing, on anyone's device. Announce the seed before the draw, and anyone can re-run it afterwards and get the identical result. You haven't asked the room to trust you; you've handed them the means to check. One honest caveat: a seeded draw is reproducible, not unpredictable — someone who knows the seed and the lists in advance could compute the outcome, so publish the seed's choice early but the lists in their final form only at draw time.

It's a task assigner wearing a party hat

Swap "prizes" for "jobs" and nothing else changes. Five volunteers and five shifts, four housemates and four cleaning zones, ten conference sessions and ten note-takers — the same two-box shuffle hands them out without a single "why do I always get the bins?" For chores specifically there's a dedicated chore roster built around recurring weekly rotation, but for one-off assignments the prize assigner is the quickest path. If your matching problem is more abstract — any two lists that need pairing, with its own seeding and repeat rules — the general two-list random matcher covers it, and for splitting up items of genuinely different value there's the fair division tool . They're all the same idea in different cuts: when a human choice would invite suspicion, replace it with a shuffle.

Run the whole thing in ninety seconds

Here's the full playbook for your next prize table. Paste the winners into the people box and the prizes into the other. Say the rule out loud: "twelve of you, four prizes, everyone gets one, prizes repeat." If the stakes justify it, announce a seed. Click once, read the pairings off the cards, copy the text into the event chat as the official record — the page's history keeps the recent draws too, timestamped, in case anyone asks later. No deliberating, no favouritism to deny, no mug-related grudges. The random prize assigner is free, runs entirely in your browser, and turns the most political minute of any prize draw into the most boring one — which is exactly what fairness looks like.