Ladder Lottery
Names on top, prizes at the bottom. Follow the lines.
Where the ladder comes from
In Japan it's amidakuji. The name is usually traced to its old shape — lines fanning out from the center like the halo behind Amida Buddha — and it has been a way to split chores and costs for centuries. Chinese speakers call it the “ghost leg”.
In Korea it's sadari-tagi, “riding the ladder”. Draw a few vertical lines on a scrap of paper, hide the prizes at the bottom, let everyone pick a top, add a few rungs, and follow the lines down. It decides who buys coffee, who cleans up and who goes first, and Korean variety shows love it for penalty games.
Why it's fair
Every rung swaps the two people on either side of it, nothing more. Going down the ladder is just a string of swaps, so two people can never land on the same bottom: everyone gets exactly one prize, and every prize gets exactly one person.
Who gets which prize is drawn first, by a fair shuffle from a random code made the moment you press the button — every person has exactly a 1-in-n chance at every prize. The rungs are then laid to match that draw, so nobody — you included — can steer them.
How does the Ladder Lottery work?
When you press Build the ladder, your browser makes a random 8-character code and puts it at the end of the link, after the names and the prizes. That code, together with the player names, starts a pseudo-random number generator, and the generator decides where the rungs go between neighbouring lines. Nobody types the rungs in, and the code is only drawn at the moment you press the button.
Each name then starts at the top of its own line and walks straight down. Whenever it meets a rung, it crosses over to the next line and keeps going down from there, until it reaches a prize at the bottom. On the result page you can tap a name to watch its route, or reveal everyone at once.
Nothing is saved on our server. The names, the prizes and the code all live in the link, so the same link draws the same ladder on any phone, while changing a name gives a different ladder. Anyone with the link can read the names and prizes. Drawing again creates a new code and a new link, so agree beforehand which link counts. By default the first prize slot says Win and the rest say Nope; you can rename any of them.