The ladder game -- amidakuji in Japan, sadaritagi in Korea, Ghost Leg in China -- is a classic method of randomly pairing two lists. Vertical lines are drawn for each player, horizontal rungs are scattered between neighboring lines, and each player traces down from the top, crossing every rung they meet, until they land on one outcome at the bottom. The rungs guarantee a fair one-to-one matching: however they're placed, no two players can ever arrive at the same result. It's a staple for handing out prizes, chores, and turn orders across East Asia, filling the role a coin toss or drawn straws play elsewhere.
Type players in one list and prizes, tasks, or outcomes in the other, then run the ladder: a random web of rungs connects the two lists and every player's path is traced live down to their result. Each run draws a completely fresh ladder, so the matching changes every time.
Every result here is drawn using crypto.getRandomValues() -- the Web Crypto API's cryptographically secure randomness -- instead of Math.random(), so it's genuinely unpredictable, not just statistically random. Learn more.
Handing out chores or prizes, setting a turn order, deciding who pays for lunch, pairing people with tasks or gift recipients -- anywhere you need one full, fair matching between two lists rather than a single winner.
The ladder scatters rungs between neighboring lines using the site's cryptographically secure randomness -- never two rungs side by side at the same height, and always at least one rung between each pair of lines. Each player then walks down their line, crossing every rung they meet, which mathematically guarantees a perfect one-to-one pairing: every player gets exactly one outcome and no outcome is picked twice. After a run, click a name at the top to spotlight just that player's path.
The missing slots are filled with "--" blanks -- so entering a single outcome like "Winner" gives you the classic one-prize ladder. Leave the outcomes list completely empty and the slots become positions: 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and so on.
2 to 8, one per line -- more columns than that and the ladder gets too cramped to read.
Never -- that's the point of the ladder. However the rungs fall, tracing them always produces a one-to-one matching, so every outcome is reached by exactly one player.
Yes -- like Wheel of Names and Card Draw, both lists are remembered in your browser across visits.
Yes -- after a run, click a player's name at the top of the ladder to highlight their path and dim the others. Click again to show all paths.
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