Everyone picks a line at the top before any of the rungs are shown. Then the paths appear and each line leads somewhere different. Known as ghost leg in English, amidakuji in Japan, and sadari in Korea.
A ladder draw is not just another way to pick at random. It produces a bijection — a strict one-to-one matching. Every person lands on exactly one outcome and every outcome is claimed by exactly one person. No result is doubled up and none is left over.
A wheel cannot do this. Spin a wheel six times for six chores and you will very likely draw the same chore twice while another goes unassigned; you would have to remove each result manually between spins. The ladder handles it structurally, which is why it is the right tool whenever the outcomes are a set to be distributed rather than a pool to be sampled.
The mathematical reason is neat: each horizontal rung swaps two adjacent lines, and no matter how many swaps you apply in sequence, the result is still a permutation. You cannot break the one-to-one property by adding rungs, only shuffle it further.
The ladder’s real advantage over every other random picker is procedural rather than mathematical. Participants choose their starting line before the paths exist. That means each person made a real choice, and nobody — including whoever is running it — could have known where that choice would lead.
This is what defuses the “the draw was rigged” objection that a wheel or a shuffled list will always attract. With a wheel, a suspicious person has to trust the tool. With a ladder, they only have to trust that the rungs were not visible when they picked, which they can verify with their own eyes. That is why the format has survived for centuries in Japan and Korea for exactly the decisions people are touchiest about.
In Japan the game is amidakuji (あみだくじ), literally “Amida lottery”. The name refers to Amida Buddha, because early versions were drawn as lines radiating from a centre point like the halo in Buddhist paintings, and only later flattened into the parallel-lines-and-rungs form used today. In Korea the same game is sadari-tagi (사다리타기), “ladder climbing”, and it is a fixture of school trips and office outings. English-language software usually calls it ghost leg, a translation of the Chinese name.
One consequence of that history is worth knowing when you use it with a mixed group: many East Asian participants will know the rules instantly and will expect to pick their line before seeing the rungs. Running it the other way round — showing the ladder first — removes the entire point and they will notice.
It is a random assignment tool, known as ghost leg in English, amidakuji in Japan and sadari-tagi in Korea. Each person picks a line at the top before the horizontal rungs are shown, then follows the path down to whatever outcome it reaches.
Yes. It is free with no sign-up and nothing to install. Set your outcomes, let everyone claim a line, and reveal the ladder.
A ladder produces a strict one-to-one matching: every person gets exactly one outcome and every outcome is taken exactly once. A wheel samples with replacement, so spinning it repeatedly can give the same result twice while leaving another unassigned.
Yes. The horizontal rungs are generated at random and are not shown until after everyone has claimed a starting line, so no starting position is better than another.
That order is what makes the draw convincing. Each participant makes a real choice at a moment when nobody, including the organiser, could know where it leads, which removes any suspicion that the draw was arranged.
Yes. It is built mobile-first, so you can pass one phone around for everyone to claim a line and then reveal the ladder for the whole group to watch.