Yes or No Wheel

Spin the wheel and you get a yes or a no, each with exactly the same chance. There is nothing to type and nothing to set up: the two answers are already on the wheel, and the pointer stops on one of them a few seconds after you click.

How to use the yes or no wheel

1. Click the wheel, press the Spin button in the middle, or hit Ctrl + Enter. Ask the question out loud first; it makes the answer land better.
2. Read the answer in the result window. Spin again if you want a second opinion, or close the window and move on.
3. Turn on Include Maybe in the Options panel if a flat yes or no is too blunt. The wheel redraws with three answers.
4. Turn on Best of 3 when one spin feels too quick. The wheel spins three times by itself and reports the majority.
5. Check the tally under This session to see how many times the wheel has said Yes, No or Maybe since you opened the page.

The spin takes six seconds unless you change Spin time to Short or Long. That is on purpose: a decision made by a wheel should take long enough to watch. If you need an answer every two seconds, pick Short and the wheel still slows down and stops properly, just faster.

What are the odds on a yes or no wheel?

Exactly even. The wheel is drawn with six slices, Yes and No alternating around the circle, so each answer owns half the wheel and no answer is sitting next to itself. The winning slice is picked the moment you click, using the same cryptographic random number generator the browser uses for secure connections, and the animation only carries the wheel to it.

Six slices instead of two is a drawing choice, not a fairness one. With two huge halves the pointer would spend the last second of every spin crawling along one edge, which looks like it is choosing; with six narrow slices the stop is crisp and obviously inside a slice. The maths does not change: three Yes slices out of six is still one chance in two. If you want to see it over thousands of spins, the is the wheel spinner random page has a simulator with a statistical test.

Each spin is independent. The wheel does not know it just said Yes four times, and it will not "owe" you a No. Long streaks are normal with a fair coin and they are normal here, which is exactly why Best of 3 exists for the moments when a single spin does not feel like enough.

Should you add Maybe?

Add Maybe when the honest answer to your question might be "not now" or "ask again later". With Include Maybe on, the wheel has nine slices, three for each answer, and each one has a one-in-three chance. Yes drops from 50% to 33%, so a wheel with Maybe says yes less often, not just less firmly.

Leave Maybe off when you are using the wheel to break a deadlock. Two people who cannot decide where to eat do not need a third outcome that sends them back to the start. The same goes for any question you have promised to obey: Maybe gives you an excuse to spin again, and spinning until you get the answer you wanted is a coin flip you have already lost.

A middle path is to treat Maybe as "the person who asked decides". The wheel settles two-thirds of questions outright and hands the remainder back to a human, which is often what a group actually wants.

Best of 3: when one spin is not enough

Best of 3 spins the wheel three times in a row, about a second and a half apart, and keeps the answer that came up most. The Options panel shows Round 1 of 3 and Round 2 of 3 while it runs, then the verdict, for example Best of 3: No. You can watch, but you do not have to click between rounds.

It does not change the long-run odds. With Yes and No only, a fair wheel still says yes half the time over many rounds. What it changes is the feel: two out of three carries more weight in a room than one spin, and it removes the "that was a fluke, go again" argument that follows a single spin. With Maybe included, three different answers in a row are possible; in that case the first answer spun wins.

Each of the three spins is counted separately in This session and in the Results tab, so a Best of 3 round adds three lines, not one. If you are keeping score for a game, remember that when you read the tally.

When a yes or no wheel is the right tool

A wheel of yes or no works best for questions that are genuinely balanced and genuinely low stakes. Order dessert? Go for a run before or after work? Text them back tonight or tomorrow? Those are decisions where thinking longer does not produce a better answer, it just produces more thinking, and a yes no wheel ends the loop.

It also works as a tie-breaker in a group. Everyone can see the wheel, everyone saw it spin, and the tally shows it has not been favouring one side. That is harder to argue with than one person's coin flip, and in a classroom or on a stream the spin itself is part of the fun.

On a stream or in a classroom the wheel does double duty as a prop. Put it in Full screen, let the audience ask the question, and spin the wheel yes or no in front of them; the tally in This session then becomes a running joke about how often the wheel has said no today. Sound and confetti are on by default for exactly that reason, and both can be switched off in the panel for a quieter room.

What it is not for is anything you will have to explain later. Health, money, other people's commitments: use the wheel to notice your reaction, then decide like a person. The Results tab lists every answer so you can show someone the spin happened, but a spin is not a reason.

Other wheels for quick decisions

This page is fixed to Yes and No so the odds stay even and there is nothing to set up. For a choice between two options you name yourself, the main wheel spinner takes any list, one per line, and gives each entry an equal slice. For odds-or-evens, heads-or-tails by number, or "pick a number and we'll go with it", the random number wheel has a 1–2 preset that behaves like a coin and ranges up to 1,000 for bigger draws. If the decision is actually "which of us has to do it", the random name picker puts the names on the wheel instead and can draw several at once.