Names in a hat

The oldest picker there is

Names in a hat works because everybody can see it working. No algorithm, no favourites, no teacher deciding: a hand goes in and a name comes out. This is the same thing with the folding and the tearing taken out, and with a counter that says how many slips are left.

Take the slip out and the hat empties one name at a time, so everybody goes before anybody goes twice. Put it back and the hat is full again on every draw. Both are useful and the page says which one it is doing, because the difference is invisible from the outside.

Pairing everybody up

A gift exchange is not a draw, it is a pairing, and the difference is where paper goes wrong. Somebody draws their own name, puts it back and draws again, and now the last two people know too much. A pairing does the whole arrangement at once: everybody gives to exactly one person, everybody receives from exactly one, and nobody has themselves.

Households can be kept apart, which is the rule most families add. Where the rules cannot all be met, the page says so and stops rather than quietly breaking one. Then the device goes round the table and each person holds the button to see their own name, exactly as the secret role cards do.

Nothing leaves the hat

The names come from the shared roster, typed once and used by every tool on the site that has players. They stay in this browser: no account, no upload, and no link that carries them, because a gift exchange that emails everybody their name is a gift exchange where one person can read the email.

If you want the spectacle rather than the privacy, the wheel does the same draw in front of everybody, and the bag of tokens does it for things that are not names.

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.

It works on the one device in front of you, passed around or propped where everybody can see it. There are no rooms, no codes and no accounts, because there is no server behind this site for any of that to run through.

This page remembers your settings in your browser under pph.hat.remove, pph.hat.mode, pph.hat.pairs and pph.hat.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.