Team Generator
Paste everyone in, pick how many teams, and let it deal them out.
Ready to split 10 people into 2 teams
Why random beats captains picking
Letting two captains pick teams is the traditional method and it is genuinely bad. It is slow, it is a popularity contest, and somebody is always chosen last in front of everyone. PE teachers moved away from it for good reason, and the same logic applies to workshops and game nights.
A random deal takes two seconds and removes the social sting completely. Nobody was rejected, because nobody was choosing. If a split genuinely looks lopsided, shuffle again, but agree the number of re-rolls before you start, or you have quietly reinvented picking teams by hand.
For anything competitive, split by ability rather than by name. Deal the strongest players out one per team first, then randomise the rest. Teams that are close in strength produce far better games than teams that are perfectly random.
Choosing how many teams
The generator asks for a number of teams, but the number that decides whether the game works is how many people end up on each one. Work backwards from that. Decide how big a team can get before somebody stops having a turn, then divide: the size range under the team count updates as you change it, so you can see the answer before you deal.
For a game where one person performs and the rest guess, like charades, four to six a team keeps everybody involved, and past eight the quiet ones vanish. For a quiz, three or four is the sweet spot: enough to pool what they know, few enough that one confident voice cannot answer for all of them. For PE, the sport sets the number and the leftovers become substitutes who rotate in.
Uneven numbers are fine. The remainder is spread out one person at a time, so a team is never more than one player bigger than another. If that one extra matters, give the smaller team the first go.
Common questions
- How does it decide the teams?
- Names are shuffled with your browser's cryptographic random number generator and dealt out so team sizes stay within one person of each other. Every shuffle gives a different split.
- What happens if the group doesn't divide evenly?
- The remainder is spread across teams rather than piled onto one, so with 11 people across 3 teams you get sizes of 4, 4 and 3.
- Can I re-roll if a split looks unfair?
- Hit Shuffle again as many times as you like. Agree beforehand how many re-rolls are allowed, though, because unlimited re-rolls is just picking teams the slow way.
- Can I share the teams with the group?
- Copy teams puts the full list on your clipboard, ready to paste into a group chat. Share link saves the name list itself so someone else can re-roll it.
- How many people can it handle?
- Hundreds. The practical limit is how many names you want to paste in, not the tool.
- Can it balance teams by skill?
- Not automatically: every split is random. Take the strongest players off the list, put one on each team yourself, then shuffle everybody else. It is a minute's work and it gets closer games than any number of re-rolls.
- Can I send the teams straight into a game?
- Yes. Once the teams are made, a row of games appears underneath: Charades and Say It Backwards take the teams and their line-ups, and Fake News Factory, Odd One Out and Miss a Beat take everyone's name as players. Nothing has to be typed in twice.