A wheel spin gives you a result in seconds. Sometimes that is exactly what you want, and sometimes it is too fast — there is no moment where anyone actually wonders who it is going to be. SpinAName's Mystery Cards mode fixes that by turning your list into a deck of face-down cards. The winner is already decided the moment the deck is dealt. Flipping the card is just how you find out.
Here is how the mode works and where it fits best.
How Mystery Cards Works
Every name in your list becomes a face-down card laid out in a grid. Tap or click a card to flip it, and the name underneath is revealed. Unlike a wheel, which does the picking for you visually, Mystery Cards puts the choice of which card to flip in your hands — even though the winner behind it was set the instant the deck was shuffled.
That small bit of agency changes how a room reacts. Instead of watching a wheel decide, someone in the room is choosing a card, and everyone else is waiting to see if it's them.
Two Deck Themes
SpinAName ships with two card back designs:
- Classic — a standard playing-card style back.
- Fruit — a brighter, illustrated theme that tends to land better with younger students.
Flip One Card, or Drag to Reveal Several
For a single winner, tap one card and it zooms into a central flip before settling to show the name — a small piece of theater for what is otherwise an instant pick. For group assignments, you can drag across several cards at once to flip them in sequence, which is useful when you need to reveal a handful of names in one motion instead of clicking through them one by one.
When to Use Mystery Cards Mode
In a classroom: Let a student walk up and flip the card themselves instead of watching a wheel decide from their seat. For group work, drag-reveal several cards at once to announce a whole team roster in one go. More classroom-specific ideas are in the guide to random pickers for teachers.
For giveaways: A face-down card holds more suspense than an instant reveal without taking as long as a full race animation. It's a middle ground between a fast wheel spin and something like Scratch Ticket.
For group assignments: Multi-card drag-reveal makes it easy to announce several winners — team leads, presentation order, breakout groups — in a single motion instead of running separate draws.
A Few Things Worth Knowing
Image entries work too. If your list has photos instead of (or alongside) names, the flipped card shows the image the same way it shows text.
Works on touch and mouse. Tap to flip on a phone or tablet, click on desktop. No app, no install.
Mystery Cards is one of five modes. For a full comparison of how it stacks up against Lucky Wheel, Gachapon, Comedy Race, and Scratch Ticket, see the mode comparison guide or the full five-modes breakdown.
Add your names, switch to Mystery Cards from the top navigation, and start flipping.