Bag of tokens

Choosing chores and tasks without an argument

The reason a bag beats a list is that nobody chose. Write the jobs down, put them in, and let each person pull one out. The washing up is nobody's decision any more, which takes the whole discussion off the table before it starts.

Because a token stays out once it has been drawn, four people drawing from a bag of four jobs always ends with four different jobs. Nothing needs crossing off and nothing can be drawn twice by accident, which is the part a hat full of folded paper gets wrong once somebody puts a slip back in without thinking.

Who goes next, without the spectacle

A classroom sometimes wants the theatre of the wheel and sometimes very much does not. Presentations, reading aloud, going up to the board: the bag does the same job quietly, in a second, with no music and no countdown, and every child knows their name comes out exactly once before anybody's comes out twice.

It is just as good at the other kind of list. Revision topics for the last ten minutes of a lesson, prizes for a raffle table, the order six teams present in, or the order the scoreboard gets updated. When the round needs a clock as well, the countdown timer is the page to open beside it.

Why nothing comes out twice

Drawing without replacement is the default because that is what a real bag does. Each draw takes a token out and the odds for everything left go up, so a bag of ten empties in exactly ten draws and the page tells you how many are left the whole way down.

Turn on putting tokens back and it behaves like a die instead: every draw is independent, the same token can come up three times in a row, and the bag never empties. Both are useful and they are different games, so the page says which one it is doing in words rather than leaving you to work it out from the results.

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