Finger Roulette Help Documentation

A complete guide to Finger Roulette, from the first round to how the pick is made.

Last Updated: November 15, 2026

1. Getting Started

Finger Roulette picks between the people who are touching one screen. The page has two parts: the stage with the Start a round button, and Round settings beside it (below it on a phone). The round itself is played in the play area, a window that opens over the whole page. Nothing is uploaded and there is no account.

The shortest way to a first round: press Start a round, let everyone put one finger on the play area, and hold still until the lights have run.

2. What to Pick

Round settings has four choices under What to pick:

• One finger - one of the fingers on the screen is picked. Needs at least 2 fingers.
• Several fingers - two to eight fingers are picked at once; the number is set in Fingers to pick. Needs one finger more than the number to pick.
• Teams - everyone is put into one of two, three or four teams of even size; the number is set in Number of teams. Needs at least one finger for each team.
• Play order - everyone gets a place: 1st, 2nd, 3rd and so on. Needs at least 2 fingers.

The heading at the top of the play area repeats the choice, for example "Pick one finger" or "Make 3 teams". To change it, close the play area, choose again and start a new round.

3. Starting a Round

Start a round opens the play area over the whole page, so that the page's menu, links, ads and banners are not under anyone's finger. On phones and tablets the tool also asks the browser for full screen. At the top of the play area are the cross that closes it, the heading, the switch between Hold and Tap, the loudspeaker button for the sound and, where the browser offers full screen, a square button that turns it on and off. The Esc key closes the play area too; in full screen, the browser uses the first Esc to leave full screen.

4. Holding Fingers

In Hold, every finger on the play area gets a ring in its own colour, and the ring follows the finger. The line under the play area says how many fingers there are and how many are still needed. As soon as there are enough, the rings start to fill: this is the countdown, three seconds unless you chose two or five.

• A finger that joins or leaves while the rings fill starts the countdown again from empty.
• Moving a finger does not start it again.
• When the rings are full, the round is locked and the line says so. From here on nobody can join, and lifting a finger changes nothing.

5. The Lights and the Result

The pick is made at the moment the round is locked. For One finger, a light then hops from ring to ring in a circle, fast at first and slower with each hop, and stops on the picked ring. For the other choices the light runs round at an even pace for about a second and a half before the result shows.

• One finger and Several fingers - each picked ring grows, gets the label Picked and sends out a slow pulse; the other rings shrink and fade. For One finger the background also takes a soft tint of the picked ring's colour.
• Teams - every ring takes the colour and the letter of its team, A to D.
• Play order - the labels 1st, 2nd, 3rd appear one after another, and the ring that goes first grows.

The line under the play area gives the same result in words, with the fingers numbered in the order they touched the screen, for example "Picked: finger 3 (teal) of 5" or "2 teams. Team A: fingers 1 and 3. Team B: fingers 2, 4 and 5".

6. Playing Again

The result stays on the screen after the fingers are lifted, so everyone can look at it. To play again in Hold, lift every finger and touch the play area again: the old rings go and a new round begins. A touch within the first moment after the result is ignored, so that a finger that slips does not wipe the result away.

7. Tap Spots

Tap spots is the way to play with a mouse, with the keyboard, on a screen that follows only one touch, or with more players than your screen can follow. Each player taps or clicks the play area once and leaves a numbered spot. A tap on a spot takes it away again. Under the play area are four buttons:

• Add a spot - places a spot for you in the freest part of the play area; useful with the keyboard.
• Remove last - takes away the spot with the highest number.
• Clear - takes away all spots.
• Pick - locks the round and starts the lights. It can be pressed once there are enough spots.

After a result the spots stay. Pick starts another round with the same spots; adding or taking away a spot clears the result first. With How players join set to Automatic, the tool chooses Hold on a screen that reports more than one touch and Tap everywhere else, and a mouse click on the play area in Hold changes it to Tap for that visit to the play area.

8. Several Fingers, Teams and Play Order

Several fingers. The chosen number of different fingers is picked at once. Every group of that size is as likely as any other.

Teams. Team sizes differ by one player at most. Seven players in two teams give a team of four and a team of three, and whether A or B is the team of four is drawn as well. Every way of splitting the group is as likely as any other; the tool cannot keep certain players together or apart.

Play order. Every finger gets one place, and every order is as likely as any other. The line under the play area lists the order from first to last.

9. How the Pick Is Made

The tool counts the fingers on the play area at the moment the round is locked and asks the browser for random numbers of the kind browsers provide for security purposes. Such a number is a whole number from 0 to 4,294,967,295. To choose one of, say, seven fingers, the simplest way would be to take the remainder after dividing by seven; but 4,294,967,296 does not divide evenly by seven, so four of the seven remainders would come up very slightly more often than the other three. The tool therefore throws away the few numbers at the top of the range that cause this and draws again. What is left divides evenly, and each finger has exactly one chance in seven.

Teams and play orders are made by shuffling with the same kind of draw, in a way that makes every arrangement equally likely. Nothing else goes in: not where a finger is, when it arrived, how hard it presses, the colour of its ring or the result of the round before. The place where the running light starts is drawn too, but only for the show.

10. Sound, Vibration and Motion

With Sound on, there is a soft tick for every hop of the light, rising in pitch, and a short chime at the result. The sounds are made in the browser, and only after you have pressed something on the page, as browsers require. The switch is in Round settings, and the loudspeaker button in the play area does the same. On devices whose browser can vibrate, Vibration at the result adds a short buzz; the switch is shown only there.

No single ring lights up more than three times a second. If your device is set to reduce motion, the lights do not run and the rings do not pulse: the result appears after a short pause. The countdown still shows as rings filling up, because it tells everyone how long to hold.

11. Settings and What Is Kept

The tool keeps its settings in this browser under one name of its own: what to pick, the number of fingers to pick, the number of teams, how players join, the countdown, sound and vibration. Nothing is kept until you change a setting for the first time. Restore the default settings, at the foot of Round settings, puts everything back as on a first visit and removes the saved copy. Nothing about the players or the rounds is kept at all: when the play area closes, the rings are gone.

12. Limits

• Rings in one round: up to 24, or fewer in Hold if your screen follows fewer touches at once.
• Several fingers: 2 to 8 picked. Teams: 2 to 4.
• Countdown: 2, 3 or 5 seconds.
• Ring colours: twelve; from the thirteenth ring the colours start again.
• The saved settings are checked value by value each time the page opens; anything that is not what the tool itself writes is replaced by the default.

13. Keyboard and Accessibility

Every control can be reached with Tab, and the groups of choices in Round settings follow the usual pattern: the arrow keys move between the choices of a group. In the play area, switch to Tap, press Add a spot once for each player and then Pick. The play area keeps the keyboard inside it while it is open; Esc closes it and the focus goes back to Start a round.

The result never depends on colour alone: picked rings grow and carry a label while the others shrink and fade, teams carry letters and a play order carries numbers. Every change, from "2 fingers. Hold still." to the result, is written in the line under the play area, which screen readers announce. Text and controls meet the contrast levels of the accessibility guidelines in both the light and the dark theme, and on phones the buttons are at least 44 pixels high.

14. Privacy and Your Data

The tool asks for no names, takes no pictures and uses neither the camera nor the microphone nor your location. During a round it knows where fingers touch its play area and nothing else, and it forgets that when the round ends. It asks no outside service for anything. Like every page on ZeroDataUpload, the page shows ads through Google AdSense and counts visits with Google Analytics; the Privacy Policy explains both.

15. How It Was Checked

Before publishing, the picking rules were tested apart from the page: 5,274,282 cases in 14 groups. The limit under which a drawn number is kept was compared with exact whole-number arithmetic for every group size the tool allows. For small groups, every possible run of draws was fed in by hand: each order of up to seven fingers, each group of picked fingers and each play order came up exactly as often as every other. Several million picks, shuffles, team splits and orders from the real generator were then compared with what chance allows, using the chi-square test with a limit of one false alarm in ten thousand. The plan of the lights was checked for every number of fingers and every start and end: it always stops on the picked ring, and no ring comes on again within a third of a second. Saved settings made to break the tool were read back as the defaults.

The page itself was then played in a test browser with simulated fingers and with a mouse and the keyboard: 282 checks, none failed. They cover rounds of every kind with two to seven simulated fingers and one with ten, 200 rounds in a row with five fingers in which the light stopped on the picked ring every time, the countdown starting again when a finger joins or leaves, rounds with spots placed by mouse and by keyboard, and the page at four screen widths in the light and the dark theme. A scan of the tool in 14 states and of its pages at two phone widths found no text under 16 px and no button under 44 px, and an accessibility scan of the tool in 62 states and of its pages found no problem. A round by mouse, by keyboard and with held fingers was also played in Firefox. The fingers in these tests were simulated by the test browser, and real screens differ in how many fingers they follow; if something does not work on yours, please tell us.

16. Troubleshooting and Support

• Nothing happens when we hold. Look at the line under the play area: it says how many fingers it sees and how many are needed. If it sees fewer than are on the screen, the screen may not follow that many touches; use Tap spots.
• The countdown keeps starting again. A finger is lifting for a moment or a new one is arriving. Everyone has to stay on the screen for the whole countdown.
• "The screen let go of the fingers." The screen stopped following the touches, often because there were too many at once. Try fewer fingers or Tap spots.
• The phone zooms, scrolls or takes a screenshot. A gesture of the phone itself is taking the touches. Turn that gesture off in the phone's settings, or use Tap spots.
• There is no sound. Check the Sound switch and the phone's own volume and silent setting.
• The play area does not fill the screen. Press the square button at the top. Where there is no such button, the browser does not offer full screen to web pages; the play area still covers the whole page.
• My settings are gone. They are kept per browser and device; a private window or cleared site data starts afresh.

For questions the FAQ does not answer, use the contact form.