Splitting a group, minus the arguments
Picking teams by hand always turns into a thing. Someone gets left for last. The two friends who wanted to be together get split up on purpose. And the captain everyone trusts somehow drafts all the fast kids first.
This tool takes that whole negotiation off your plate. Paste names, one per line, choose how you want them grouped, and it deals everyone out at random. The draw is blind, so nobody can claim the split was rigged.
How it works
Type or paste your roster into the box. The counter at the top tells you how many people it read, which is handy when you copied a list from somewhere and aren’t sure a blank line snuck in.
Then pick your mode. Two ways to slice it:
- Number of teams. You know you want 4 groups. Set it to 4 and the people get spread across them.
- People per team. You want pairs, or groups of 5. Set the size and the tool figures out how many teams that makes.
Hit Generate teams. The names get shuffled with a Fisher-Yates pass (the standard, unbiased way to randomize an ordered list), then dealt out round-robin so the teams come out as even as the numbers allow. If 13 people split into 4 teams, you get sizes of 4, 3, 3, 3, not one stacked team and three thin ones.
Don’t love the draw? Shuffle again runs a fresh one. Same settings, new lineup. Keep going until it feels right.
Little things that help
You can rename any team. Click the heading (it starts as Team 1, Team 2, and so on) and type whatever you want: Reds, Blues, Table 3. The names you set stick around when you reshuffle, so you only label once.
Happy with a split? The Copy button drops the whole thing onto your clipboard as plain text, each team with its members listed out. Paste it into Slack, a group chat, or the class projector. Nothing gets uploaded either, so a roster of real names never touches a server.
Where people actually use this
PE teachers reach for it constantly. Thirty kids, four stations, and you need groups before the bell stops ringing. Paste the class list, set four teams, done.
Coaches and pickup-game organizers use it to keep scrimmages fair. No more “you always put the good players together.” The draw doesn’t know who’s good.
For group projects, instructors split a lecture into working teams without playing favorites or letting the same cliques clump up every single time. Shuffle once, post the result, move on.
And then there’s game night. Charades, trivia, board games with teams: drop everyone’s name in, pick two teams, and you’ve skipped the ten minutes of “okay who’s with who.” More time for the actual game.
Questions people ask
Are the teams really random, or is there a pattern?
Really random. Each generate runs a fresh Fisher-Yates shuffle before dealing names out, so any person can land on any team. Reshuffling with the same settings gives you a genuinely different result.
Can I make sure the teams are even?
Yep. Names get dealt one at a time across the teams, so sizes never differ by more than one. If the total doesn’t divide cleanly, the extra people land on the first few teams.
What if I want specific people together (or apart)?
The tool draws blind, so it won’t honor pairing requests. The simple workaround: generate, and if two names you wanted split ended up together, just hit Shuffle again. Most of the time a couple of redraws lands a split everyone’s happy with.
Is there a limit on how many names I can add?
No hard cap. It works fine for a handful of friends or a roster of a few hundred. Very large lists just make for a lot of scrolling through team cards.
Do my names get sent anywhere?
Nope. Everything runs locally in your browser. Close the tab and the list is gone, nothing is stored or uploaded.
Can I save a split for later?
Not directly, but Copy gives you the full text. Drop it in a note, a doc, or a pinned message and you’ve got a record you can pull up next time.