Make random teams in three steps
- Paste your names, one per line. A column copied from a spreadsheet or a class list works fine.
- Choose how to split them: by number of teams, or by how many people you want on each team.
- Click Make teams. The names are dealt out into colored team cards. Don’t like the result? Click Make new teams for a fresh shuffle.
Your list is saved in your browser, so next week’s teams are one click away.
Prefer a team picker wheel?
Some groups like to watch names come up one by one, like a draft. Put your names on the wheel of names, spin, and choose Remove from wheel after each pick. Assign the first pick to Team 1, the second to Team 2, and keep going round. It takes longer than Make teams, but it turns picking teams into part of the game.
Balanced teams with tags
A purely random split can put all the strongest players, or all the girls, or every seventh grader on one team. Tags fix that. Add a comma and a tag after any name:
Mia, Girls
Leo, Boys
Ana, Girls
Sam, Boys
Then tick Balance tags across teams. Each tag is spread out as evenly as it can be, and the teams stay random within that. Tags can be anything: gender, grade, skill level, position (goalie, defense, forward), department, or table number. Names without a tag are treated as their own group.
Captains and team names
Tick Pick a captain for each team and one person on each team is chosen at random and marked Captain. It’s an easy way to decide who picks the team name, who reports back, or who goes first.
Tip: Want pairs from a class with an odd number of students? Choose Number of teams and set it to half the class, rounded down. One group gets three.
To name the teams yourself, type one name per line in Team names. Red Dragons, Blue Sharks, Table 1, Group A: anything works. Extra names are ignored and missing ones fall back to Team 1, Team 2 and so on.
Where people use a random team generator
- Classrooms: group projects, lab partners, reading circles and debate teams, without anyone feeling left out or picked last.
- PE and sports practice: split a class or a pickup game into fair sides in seconds, balanced by skill if you tag players.
- Work: breakout rooms, hackathon teams, workshop tables and secret Santa groups.
- Game nights: trivia teams, charades, and any game that needs pairs or squads.
- Tournaments: draw groups or pairings for a bracket.
How the shuffle works
The generator uses your browser’s cryptographic random number generator to shuffle the list, so every arrangement is equally likely. People are dealt to the smallest team first, with ties broken at random, so team sizes never differ by more than one. With balancing on, each tag is dealt the same way, team by team. Nothing is sent to a server: the shuffle happens on your device.
Keyboard shortcut
Press Ctrl + Enter (⌘ + Enter on a Mac) to make a new set of teams.