Turn Order — Who Goes First, Settled
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Who is playing
Names stay in this browser and are not sent anywhere.
This shuffles the whole list rather than picking one name, so it answers the seating question as well as the starting one. Everybody gets a position, and the order it produces is a real shuffle rather than a rotation of the order you typed.
Why not just go clockwise
Clockwise from the dealer is the rule in almost every card game, but somebody still has to be the dealer, and in games where going first is a genuine advantage — bidding games especially — starting from whoever happened to sit nearest the kitchen is not neutral.
How the shuffle works
A Fisher–Yates shuffle, which is the one that produces every possible order with equal probability. The naive alternative — sorting by a random number — quietly favours some orders over others, and with five or six people the bias is large enough to notice.
Games where the order matters
Other tools
Keep score offline
The sheet above works in your browser. Cardzo for iPhone remembers your players, survives a closed tab, and works in a field with no signal.
Coming to the App Store.