Who goes first

The oldest argument at the table

Almost every game has a first-player rule and almost nobody uses it. The rule books are full of them: youngest starts, whoever last fed an animal, whoever most recently travelled by boat, the player wearing the most green. They exist because going first is worth something in most games, and because a table without a rule spends two minutes deciding before it spends an hour playing.

What the printed rules cannot do is remember. Over an evening of five games, going first tends to fall to whoever is quickest to claim it, and by the fourth game somebody has noticed. A hat that empties before it refills fixes that without anybody having to keep score: four players, four rounds, four different starters, and the tool holds the memory so the table does not have to.

Random, fair, and the difference between them

A plain random pick is not the same as a fair one. Rolling a die for the starter every round can genuinely hand the same person three rounds in a row, and although that is exactly what random means, it is not what anybody at the table wants from it. The no-repeats rule draws without replacement instead: your name comes out of the hat and stays out until everybody else's has come out too.

The screen shows you the hat as it empties. Names still waiting are outlined solid, names who have already started are outlined with a dashed line, and the line under the list counts down. When the hat is empty it says so, and the next draw begins a fresh set rather than quietly carrying on.

House rules, and the tools next door

If your table already has a rule it likes, the pick-by-hand setting keeps it: nothing is drawn, and tapping a name records who starts. It is the right setting for the classic "last round's loser goes first", which is a fine rule and one no tool can work out on its own.

For a role that somebody keeps for the whole round rather than a single question at the top of it, the leader token is the page next door, with a tally of who has led. For the full playing order dealt out as cards, the turn order cards do that in one go, and when the answer wants to be a spectacle rather than a card, the wheel is still the most satisfying way to pick a name out of a list.

Nothing to install, nothing to sign up for

The tool runs entirely in your browser. There is no account, nothing you make is uploaded, and nothing you type is sent anywhere or put into a link.

The page itself is not silent, though: it carries advertising code and a visit counter that sets no cookie, and the cookie page says exactly what each of those does.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.first.state, pph.first.rule and pph.first.muted, and nowhere else. Clearing your site data for papercarnival.com removes it.

Player names are kept under pph.players so every tool with players reads the same list. They stay in this browser and never reach a link.