Random Group Generator

What is the Random Group Generator?

The Random Group Generator shares the same distribution engine as the Team Generator but is aimed at grouping things rather than picking sides. Discussion topics across breakout rooms, experiments across lab benches, presentations across sessions, passengers across cars: anything where the aim is a tidy split rather than a competitive balance.

You can split by the number of groups or by how many items each group should hold, and the result is a set of labelled cards you can rearrange before printing.

How to use it

1. Paste your items, one per line.
2. Choose whether to set the number of groups or the size of each group.
3. Pick equal sizes or fully random sizes.
4. Optionally name the groups yourself, or let the tool suggest names.
5. Press “Create groups”, then drag items between cards if you want to adjust.

How the random selection works

Items are shuffled with a Fisher-Yates pass driven by crypto.getRandomValues(), then dealt to the group with the fewest members. That guarantees group sizes differ by at most one in equal mode, while the shuffle guarantees that which items land together is genuinely random each time.

The full algorithm — including the rejection-sampling step and the wheel stop-angle calculation — is written out on the methodology page.

Practical examples

• Assigning 24 discussion topics across six breakout rooms.
• Splitting a conference’s lightning talks into four sessions.
• Dividing a reading list among study groups so no group overlaps.
• Allocating lab experiments across benches for a rotation.
• Sorting a car-share list into vehicles.

Available options

• Split by group count or group size.
• Equal or fully random distribution.
• Custom or suggested group names.
• Keep-together and keep-apart rules.
• Drag-and-drop and keyboard moves.
• Print-friendly layout and CSV export.

Privacy

Whether your items are topics or people, the handling is identical. Everything you type stays in this browser tab. There is no account, no upload step and no server-side copy of your list: the draw runs in JavaScript on your own device. Nothing is written to browser storage unless you explicitly save a list or tick the option to keep your draw history, and both can be cleared at any time from the privacy page.

Full details are in the privacy policy, which also has a button that deletes everything this site has stored in your browser.

Fairness and limitations

Every item is equally likely to land in any group, and no group is favoured when the split does not divide evenly — the remainder is spread across the first groups after the shuffle, so being “group one” carries no advantage on average. As with any grouping tool, constraints you add can force uneven sizes; when that happens it is stated rather than hidden.