Ladder game

Build a ladder from players and outcomes for random matching.

Players (separate with commas / line breaks) Outcomes (separate with commas / line breaks)

Enter players and outcomes, then generate.

Six people, one coffee run, and nobody wants to volunteer. A ladder draw settles it without anyone feeling singled out — everyone picks a line, the rungs decide the rest. This tool builds the ladder for you, draws it, and traces each participant down to their outcome.

How it works

Setting it up

Fill in the two boxes:

Players — the names taking part, separated by commas or line breaks.
Outcomes — what each line leads to: tasks, prizes, seats, teams, anything.

You need at least two players. If you supply fewer outcomes than players, the remaining slots are filled with a dash, so you can use the ladder to pick just one or two people out of a group. Extra outcomes beyond the number of players are trimmed. Press Generate ladder and the drawing appears, with the result mapping listed underneath.

How the ladder decides

The board is a set of vertical lines — one per player — connected by horizontal rungs placed at random. Following a path means walking down your own line and, whenever you meet a rung, stepping sideways onto the neighbouring line before continuing down.

Rungs are laid out row by row, and the tool skips any position directly adjacent to a rung already placed in that row. Two rungs meeting at the same point would make the path ambiguous, so this rule keeps every route well defined. Because each rung swaps exactly two neighbouring lines, no two players can ever land on the same outcome — the assignment is always a clean one-to-one shuffle.

Randomness comes from the browser's cryptographic random number generator rather than a simple pseudo-random call, so the layout is not predictable from previous draws.

Reading the result

Each player's route is drawn in its own colour, and the text list below the canvas spells out who got what. Names longer than six characters are shortened on the drawing itself to keep the labels readable — the full names still appear in the list. Press the button again for a completely new ladder.

Terms explained

Player: A participant in the draw. Each one occupies a vertical line at the top of the ladder.
Outcome: What sits at the bottom of each line — the prize, task or role being assigned.
Rung: A horizontal bar joining two neighbouring lines. Hitting one moves your path sideways.
Path: The route traced from a player's starting line down to the outcome they end up on.
One-to-one: The property that every player receives a different outcome, guaranteed by how the rungs work.

Frequently asked questions

Can two people end up with the same outcome?

No. Every rung simply swaps two adjacent paths, so the ladder always produces a one-to-one assignment. If two players appear to share a result, it is because you entered the same outcome text on more than one line.

Is the draw genuinely random?

The rung positions come from the browser's cryptographic random number generator, which is designed to be unpredictable and is not seeded from the clock or from earlier draws. Each press of the button produces an independent layout.

What if I have more players than outcomes?

Any leftover slots are filled with a dash. This is useful when you only need to pick one or two people from a group — enter the single outcome you care about and let everyone else land on a dash.

Do I need to install anything or sign in?

No. The ladder is drawn in your browser with plain JavaScript and a canvas element, nothing is uploaded, and no account is required. It works on a phone as well as a desktop.

Why are the names shortened on the picture?

Labels on the ladder are trimmed to six characters so the columns stay legible when there are many players. The full names you typed are shown in the result list printed below the drawing.