Every Feature of the Wheel of Names Spin Wheel, Explained
A complete, plain-language guide to how the wheel spinner actually works, and why each feature exists.
Last updated: August 3, 2026
You should read this because every feature below is live in the app today, not a wish list, and knowing they exist means you get more out of the wheel than a default spin and a plain list of names.
This guide walks through every feature of the wheel spinner: the physics behind each spin, entry customization, sound and confetti, sharing and the public gallery, AI generation, themed templates, offline support, and the built-in fairness audit.
Each feature explains what it does and why it exists, in plain language, organized into twelve groups so you can jump straight to the part you care about.
Wheel Mechanics & Physics
The wheel runs on a canvas-based physics engine built for this app, not a generic animation library. These are the mechanics that decide how a spin actually feels and lands.
Physics-based spin
The wheel spins using a real physics simulation, drag, friction, and a small wobble as it slows down, not a canned CSS animation. Each spin plays out a little differently, which is what makes the result feel like an actual spin instead of a scripted reveal.
A fixed-duration animation would look the same every time and feel fake for raffles or classroom picks.
Physics-based motion also lets you tune spin length and landing randomness separately, so the wheel matches how dramatic you want the reveal to feel.
Weighted outcomes
Weighted slices let you give some entries better odds than others by setting a weight on each one. A higher weight makes both the slice bigger and the entry more likely to win, without duplicating names to fake the odds.
This is what makes prize tiers and loaded raffles possible: a grand prize can keep a small slice but real odds, while common prizes fill the rest of the wheel.
Idle pre-spin motion
Before anyone hits spin, the wheel can rotate slowly on its own, a subtle idle motion that signals it is live and ready rather than a static image. It turns itself off automatically when your device has reduced motion enabled.
It is a small touch, but it tells first-time visitors the wheel is interactive before they even touch it, and it respects accessibility settings by default.
Six pointer styles
Six pointer designs, flapper, wedge, needle, glass, jewel, and pin, decide how the winning slice gets marked, and each one animates a little differently as it crosses a slice boundary. You can also move the pointer to the top or the 3 o'clock position.
A flapper suits a classic carnival wheel, while a jewel or glass pointer fits a premium giveaway or streaming overlay. It is a styling choice with no effect on fairness.
Two center button modes
The middle of the wheel works one of two ways: a classic teardrop SPIN button whose tip doubles as the pointer, or hub mode, where the whole center disc is a white, tappable circle with its own separate animated pointer on top.
Hub mode gives you a bigger, easier target to tap on mobile and a cleaner look for branded or embedded wheels.
Winner highlight
When the wheel stops, the winning slice gets a highlighted fill and stroke so the result is obvious at a glance, even from across a classroom or a stream overlay, before the result dialog even opens.
It closes the gap between the wheel stopping and the audience actually knowing who won, which matters most on a shared screen.
Entry & Slice Customization
Beyond plain text, every slice can carry an image, a custom color, and its own font treatment, so the wheel reads well no matter what you are picking between.
Images on any entry
Any entry can carry its own image instead of, or alongside, its text label, drawn right into the slice. It works for team logos, food photos, prize pictures, or character sprites, anything that makes a slice easier to recognize at a glance.
Text-only wheels work fine for names, but a visual wheel reads faster for younger audiences and looks better on a stream or a shared screen.
Background image modes
You can set a background image behind the whole wheel in one of three modes: overlay, which tints your slice colors over the image; background, which shows the image with no color tint; or colors, your slice colors with no image at all.
Overlay is the most commonly used mode because it keeps entries readable while still showing off a themed background image underneath.
Custom fonts and dividers
Slice labels can use a custom font from the built-in set, and thin dividers between slices can be turned on to make each option easier to tell apart, especially on wheels with many similarly colored entries.
Long or crowded entry lists get harder to read fast. A matching font and clear dividers keep a busy wheel legible.
Color theme picker
A built-in color theme picker lets you recolor every slice at once from a browsable gallery of ready-made palettes, or set your own custom colors per entry if you want full control instead.
Picking colors one slice at a time is slow on a 30-entry wheel. A palette applies a coherent look in one click.
Theming & Branding
The wheel can match your site or stream's look automatically, and carry your own logo when the wheel itself should feel like your brand.
Automatic dark and light theme
The wheel reads its background and text colors from the same design variables as the rest of the page, so it switches between light and dark mode automatically whenever your site's theme changes, with no separate wheel setting to manage.
A wheel that stays bright white in dark mode looks broken. Automatic syncing means it never falls out of step with the page around it.
Branding logo overlay
You can place your own logo image on top of the wheel, dragging it to position and pinching or scrolling to resize it, so streams and shared links carry your branding directly on the wheel itself.
For streamers and teachers who reuse the same wheel often, a logo makes every shared link and screenshot instantly recognizable as theirs.
Clean share mode
A single toggle hides the wheel's title and description on fullscreen views and shared links, leaving just the wheel and your logo on screen with no extra text competing for attention.
It is built for the moment your branding, not the wheel's internal title, should be the thing viewers actually notice.
Sound & Celebration Effects
A spin can end quietly or with a proper celebration, sound and confetti included, and both are easy to turn off if you would rather keep things simple.
Built-in sound effects
Built-in sound plays a priming tone when a spin starts, a tick every time the pointer crosses a slice, and a fanfare when the wheel lands on a winner, all without you needing to record or upload any audio yourself.
The ticking sound alone does a lot of work: it gives the audience an audible sense of the wheel slowing down before the winner is even visible.
Confetti celebration
A configurable confetti burst fires the moment a winner is chosen, with the number of bursts, particle count, and launch point all adjustable, so the celebration matches how big a moment the result actually is.
It turns a plain result into a moment worth screenshotting, which matters most for giveaways and classroom rewards.
Entry Management Tools
Getting names onto the wheel, and keeping them organized once you have thirty or more, is its own set of tools separate from the wheel visuals.
Table and free-text input
Entries can be added two ways: a spreadsheet-style table with a row per entry and columns for weight, color, and image, or a plain free-text box where you paste one entry per line and let the app build the rows for you.
Free-text mode is the fastest way to paste a class list from another app. Table mode is better once you need per-entry control.
Per-row controls
Every entry row supports its own weight, a one-click duplicate, a show or hide toggle to bench an entry without deleting it, and its own image and color, with optional columns you can turn on only when you need them.
Hiding instead of deleting matters most for recurring wheels, like a rotating chore list where names come and go each week.
Shuffle and sort
A one-click shuffle randomizes the order of your entries, and sorting tools let you reorder the list alphabetically or manually, useful before a spin if you want the visual order on the wheel to look intentional.
Order on the wheel does not change the odds, but a shuffled or sorted list looks more deliberate on camera or a shared screen.
Mystery Wheel
Mystery Wheel hides every slice's label behind a question mark until the wheel stops spinning, so nobody, including the person running it, can see which name sits where before the result lands.
It removes any perception that the spinner steered the outcome, which matters most for raffles run in front of a skeptical audience.
Mystery Result
Mystery Result keeps the winner's name hidden in the result dialog after the wheel stops, until you choose to reveal it, adding a beat of suspense between the spin ending and the name actually being shown.
It works well for award-style reveals where you want to build anticipation for a few seconds before announcing who won.
No repeat winners
Turning on Remove winner after spin automatically drops each winning entry off the wheel the moment it is picked, so the next spin can never land on that same name again.
This is the setting that turns a single wheel into a multi-prize raffle: keep spinning and every draw is guaranteed to be a fresh name.
Save, Export & Backup
Everything you build lives in your own browser, with no account required, and you can move it to a file or another device whenever you need to.
No-account saving, multiple wheels
Wheels save automatically to your browser's local storage as you edit them, no account or sign-up required, and you can build several separate wheels and switch between them from a history list at any time.
It means a teacher can keep a class-picker wheel and a rewards wheel side by side, saved locally, without ever creating a login.
Backup and restore
The Backup & restore panel exports your current wheel to a downloadable JSON file, and importing that file later restores every entry, color, and setting exactly as it was, whether on the same device or a different one.
Local storage alone will not survive clearing your browser data or switching computers. A backup file is the safety net for that.
Up to 100 entries per wheel
A single wheel supports up to 100 entries, a limit chosen so the wheel stays legible and the page stays responsive even at that size, rather than an arbitrary restriction.
Past a hundred slices, labels stop being readable on any screen size, so the cap protects the wheel's usefulness rather than limiting it.
AI-Powered Generation
When enabled, an AI assistant can build, extend, or clean up a wheel from a short description, with every suggestion left for you to review before it touches your wheel.
Generate, expand, and cleanup modes
AI generation covers three jobs: generate builds a brand-new wheel from a text description, expand adds more entries that fit the ones you already have, and cleanup tidies up a pasted or messy list into consistent entries.
Each mode solves a different starting point: a blank wheel, a short list that needs padding out, or a rough copy-pasted list.
Editable AI suggestions
The AI suggests a title, a full set of entries, and matching colors in one pass, all shown to you as an editable draft. Nothing gets added to your actual wheel until you review and accept the suggestion.
Keeping a human review step means the AI can move fast without ever silently overwriting a wheel you already built.
Templates & Themed Tools
Beyond the general-purpose wheel, a set of ready-made templates and themed tools cover common use cases without any setup.
Templates gallery
The Templates gallery is a library of pre-built starting wheels, covering common uses like decisions, prizes, and games, that you can open and immediately start editing instead of building a wheel from a blank page.
It is the fastest path from needing a wheel for something specific to an actual working wheel, especially for a first-time visitor.
GTA 6 themed wheels
A set of Grand Theft Auto 6 themed wheels lets you spin for your next in-game activity, a random character, a crew name, or a region of Leonida to explore, and every one of them is fully editable.
Themed tools like this bring in visitors searching for that specific game or topic, not just generic random wheel searches.
Pokemon roulette
The Pokemon roulette wheel spins across a roster of Pokemon sprites, with filters for generation and type, and can also pick a random starter or randomize a full team in one spin.
It draws from a roster of roughly a thousand Pokemon, filtered down live rather than showing every option on one crowded wheel.
Color picker wheel
The color picker wheel spins to a single random color from a rainbow, basic, pastel, warm, or cool set, and shows the winning shade's name and swatch once it lands.
It is a quick way to settle on a color for a project, a game, or a design choice without scrolling a palette manually.
Charades generators
A family of charades wheels spins up a random word or phrase to act out, with ready-made sets for kids, dumb charades using movie names, Christmas, and general game nights, and every set is editable.
Ready-made word lists save the setup work of typing out a charades list from scratch before a game night.
Embeddable wheel
The Embed tool lets you customize a wheel and then copy an iframe code that drops the live, spinnable wheel directly onto your own website or blog post.
It puts a fully working wheel on someone else's page without them needing to build or host anything themselves.
Works Offline (PWA)
The app installs like a native app and keeps working once it has loaded, even without an internet connection.
Installable app
The wheel app can be installed to your phone or desktop home screen as a Progressive Web App, launching in its own window rather than a browser tab, the same way a native app would.
An installed app is one tap away instead of a bookmark to dig up, which matters for a wheel you spin often.
Offline support
Once the app has loaded, a service worker lets it keep working without an internet connection, so an existing wheel stays fully usable mid-flight, in a classroom with spotty Wi-Fi, or anywhere else the connection drops.
A spin wheel used live, in a classroom or on stage, cannot afford to break the moment the connection wobbles.
Accessibility & Keyboard Shortcuts
The wheel can be run entirely from the keyboard, and its animations respect your device's motion settings by default.
Keyboard shortcuts
Space spins the wheel, S shuffles the entries, M mutes or unmutes sound, F toggles fullscreen, Backspace removes the current winner, and ? opens a help dialog listing every shortcut, so the wheel can be run hands-free from the keyboard.
Keyboard control matters most when the wheel is projected on a classroom screen and the presenter is standing away from the mouse.
Logo placement gestures
A branding logo placed on the wheel can be repositioned by dragging it and resized by scrolling or pinching, the same direct-manipulation gestures you would expect from a photo editor rather than a settings form.
Direct gestures are faster than typing pixel offsets into a form, especially for a one-off adjustment before going live.
Reduced motion respected everywhere
Every animation the wheel plays, the idle pre-spin motion, the pointer's kick on each slice cross, and the hub button's press ripple, checks your device's reduced-motion setting first and turns itself off when that setting is on.
Motion-sensitive users should not have to choose between using the app and avoiding animations that bother them.
Fairness & Trust
You do not have to take it on faith that the wheel is fair. A built-in tool proves it with real numbers.
Built-in randomness audit
The Randomness checker runs 10,000 simulated spins right in your browser using your browser's own cryptographically secure random generator, then shows the actual win distribution across every entry so you can verify the fairness yourself.
Anyone can claim a wheel is fair. Running 10,000 real spins in front of you and showing the results is proof, not a promise.
For a deeper look at how the randomness itself works, see our guide on whether Wheel of Names can be rigged.
Frequently asked questions
- How many features does the wheel spinner actually have?
- This page covers around 40 individual features across wheel physics, entry customization, sound and confetti, sharing, AI generation, themed tools, offline support, accessibility, and a built-in fairness audit. Every feature listed here is live in the app today, not a roadmap item.
- Is every feature on this page free to use?
- Yes. Every feature described here, including weighted slices, unlimited saved wheels, sharing, and the fairness audit, is free with no account required. AI generation is the one feature that depends on whether a given deployment has it turned on.
- Do I need to create an account to use these features?
- No account is required for any core feature. Wheels save to your browser automatically, and even sharing a link or browsing the public gallery works without signing up.
- Does the wheel work without an internet connection?
- Yes. Once the app has loaded once, it works offline as an installed Progressive Web App, so an existing wheel keeps spinning even if your connection drops mid-session.
- How do I know the wheel picks a fair, random winner?
- The built-in Randomness checker runs 10,000 simulated spins using your browser's secure random generator and shows the real win distribution for every entry, so you can verify the fairness yourself instead of taking our word for it.