Set up a wheel for a live event

Running the wheel on a screen in front of an audience is different from spinning it on your own phone. The list has to be readable from the back row, the sound has to fit the room, and the pace has to keep people watching. This is the checklist we would run through before the doors open.

Do the setup before anyone is watching

Finish your setup first, while the room is still empty or quiet. Changing colours while fifty people stare at a loading screen is the part that makes an event feel unplanned. Open the wheel, load your list, and check it on the actual screen you will use — a laptop panel and a projector show colours very differently.

Display and title

Start with the display. Turn on fullscreen so the wheel fills the screen and nothing else shows. Then give the wheel a title — the name of the event, or the prize — so anyone walking in knows what the spin is for.

Speed, sound, and colours

These three settings do most of the work for how the draw feels:

• Spin speed. Slow, normal, or fast. Slow stretches the tension for a single headline prize. Fast suits a long line of small prizes where you want to keep moving.
• Sound. You can turn on the spin sound, the win sound, or mute everything. In a quiet room the sound is a cue that something happened; in a noisy hall it can get lost, so test the volume once.
• Colour theme. Pick one that reads clearly on your screen and fits the event. High contrast matters more than decoration — the names need to be legible before they are pretty.

You can also toggle the gap between items, which makes a busy wheel easier to read, and clear the wheel when you want to start a fresh list.

Write names short

Whatever you type is what the audience sees, so keep the entries short. A first name and last initial reads better from ten metres away than a full job title. If two people share a name, add one distinguishing letter rather than a long description.

Run the draw

Once the doors open, keep the flow simple:

• Show the full list before the first spin.
• Spin, let the wheel stop fully, and call the winner out loud.
• If you have several prizes, turn on elimination mode, so each winning item is removed automatically and the same name cannot come up twice.
• Watch the remaining-item count as you go — it tells you how many rounds are left at a glance.

Saving the list and sharing it

If this is a recurring event, save the wheel to a free account so you can pull up the same list next time instead of retyping it. Signing in is also what keeps your history and statistics — total spins and remaining items — from disappearing when you close the tab.

If you only need to hand the setup to someone else, you can generate a share link without an account. That link is fine for a one-off; saving the wheel is the option for next week.

One more thing worth knowing: the interface is available in 34 languages, and you switch between them by using a different subdomain. If your event is not in English, check that before you go live.

Keep it simple in front of an audience

Most event problems are small ones — a list too long to read, a sound that is too loud, a name typed wrong. None of them are hard to avoid; they just need a few minutes of setup and a dry run.

Ready to set one up? open the wheel, build your list, put it on the big screen, and run a draw the room can follow.