Random Team Generator

Paste names on the left, choose a number of teams or a team size, and press Make teams: the random team generator shuffles the list and deals it into even groups in one click. Ten people into three teams gives 4, 3 and 3, never 6, 3 and 1.

How to make random teams

1. Put one name per line in the box on the left. Paste a whole list and press Tidy to drop numbering, blank lines and duplicates.
2. Choose Split by: Number of teams if you know how many groups you need, People per team if you know how big each should be.
3. Enter the number, from 1 to 50 teams or 1 to 100 people per team, and press Make teams.
4. Read the cards on the right. Each team shows its name, its size and its members, in the same colours the wheels on this site use.
5. Press Shuffle again if you want a different arrangement, or tick Lock on a team you want to keep and reshuffle only the rest.
6. Press Copy to put the teams on the clipboard as text, one team per block.

The page starts with twelve example names and three teams, so pressing Make teams straight away shows you what the output looks like. You need at least two names before the button is enabled; one person is not a team.

What happens when the numbers do not divide evenly?

The remainder goes to the first teams, one extra person each, and no team is ever more than one person larger than another. The generator shuffles the list first, then deals: the first name to Team 1, the second to Team 2, the third to Team 3, and the fourth back to Team 1. When the names run out, whichever teams received a name in the last round are the ones with the extra person.

Because the shuffle happens before the deal, the person who ends up as the "extra" in Team 1 is random too; it is not the last name on your list. If you would rather the extra people went somewhere specific, such as the team with the strongest players, lock that team afterwards and reshuffle the others, or edit one name across in the copied text.

With People per team the arithmetic runs the other way. Ask for groups of four from fourteen names and the generator makes four teams, because three teams of four would leave two people out. Those four teams come out as 4, 4, 3 and 3, so the last groups are slightly under the size you asked for rather than anyone being dropped.

Lock a team and reshuffle the rest

Every team card has a Lock checkbox. Tick it and press Shuffle again: that team keeps exactly the members it has, and only the people in the unlocked teams are shuffled and redealt among the unlocked cards. Teams are renumbered so the locked ones come first, but their members do not move.

This is the fix for the usual complaint after a random split, which is that most of the teams are fine and one is not. Lock the ones that are fine, reshuffle, and only the problem team changes. It also lets you build a draw in stages: lock the two teams that were formed last week, reshuffle the new arrivals into the remaining slots, and the returning players stay together.

Lock does not pin a specific person to a specific team, only the whole team as it stands. To move one person, the quickest route is to lock everything except the two teams involved and reshuffle until the swap you want appears, or to copy the text and edit it. If you change the names on the left after locking, the locked team keeps its old members, so unlock and regenerate after editing the list.

Number of teams or people per team?

Pick Number of teams when the slots are fixed by the activity: three stations in the lab, four corners for a debate, two sides for a match. The generator puts everyone into exactly that many teams and balances the sizes to within one person.

Pick People per team when the size is what matters: pairs for a peer review, tables of five for a workshop, squads of eleven. The generator divides the list by that size and rounds up, so nobody is left over, and the last teams are at most one person short. For pairs from an odd number of names, one pair becomes a three, which is usually what a teacher would do by hand anyway.

The number is kept between Make teams presses, so if you decide three teams was wrong, change it to four and press Shuffle again. The whole list is redealt unless something is locked.

Why there is no wheel on this page

A spinner picks one slice per spin. Making six teams of five that way would mean thirty spins, each one removing a name and redrawing the wheel, and the teams would still not come out even unless you counted carefully. Dealing a shuffled list does the same job in one click and guarantees the sizes.

The randomness is the same, though. The shuffle uses the browser's cryptographic random number generator, the same source the wheels on this site use to choose a slice, so every ordering of the list is equally likely and no position on your list is favoured. If you want the drama of a wheel for the pick that matters most, such as which team goes first, make the teams here, copy the team names into the wheel spinner, and spin once.

Teams for the classroom, the office and game night

Teachers are the people who split groups most often, and the useful habit is to paste the class list once, press Tidy, and keep this page open for the lesson. New task, new press of Shuffle again, and the groups change without anyone being able to engineer who they sit with. The spinner wheel for the classroom page collects that routine with others, such as choosing which group presents first.

Seating plans are the same job with a different name. Set Number of teams to the number of tables, press Make teams, and each card is a table; press Shuffle again at the start of every term and nobody keeps the same neighbours by default. Because the shuffle is random rather than alphabetical, siblings and best friends are split up as often as chance allows, and Lock handles the exceptions.

For a workplace workshop, People per team at 4 or 5 keeps tables conversational, and Copy pastes the groups straight into the agenda. For sport and game night, Number of teams at 2 gives you sides, and Lock lets you keep the captains' teams while the latecomers are dealt in. If you need to draw individuals instead of groups, such as three volunteers or a single winner, the random name picker picks from the same kind of list one spin at a time.