Secret Santa Generator

Organise a Secret Santa (or Korean 마니또) exchange without pulling names from a hat. Enter the participants, keep couples or housemates from drawing each other, and the page makes a fair draw in which nobody gets themselves. Instead of emailing everyone, it gives each person a private code: they open this page, choose “Reveal my match”, paste the code and the event password, and see only their own match — so even the organiser can join in without knowing the list.

How to use this tool

1. List the participants, one per line.
2. Add exclusions such as “Ana ≠ Ben” for couples, or “Chloe -> Dev” for a one-way rule like last year’s pairing.
3. Set an event password and optionally the budget and date; tick “one single gift loop” if you want one chain.
4. Press the button and send each person their own code, the password and this page’s link.
5. Each person chooses “Reveal my match” and pastes their code.

Formula

A valid draw is a permutation p with p(i) ≠ i and no banned pair (i, p(i))

The page draws a random permutation with an unbiased secure Fisher–Yates shuffle — or a random single cycle with Sattolo’s algorithm in loop mode — and redraws until every rule holds. Rejecting invalid draws keeps every valid assignment equally likely. A matching check first tells you if your exclusions make a draw impossible.

Example

With A, B, C and the rule A -> B, there are only two draws where nobody gets themselves (A→B→C→A and A→C→B→A), and the rule rules out the first, so the result is always A → C, C → B, B → A. With six people and one couple kept apart, 168 of the 720 possible orders are valid, and each of those 168 is equally likely.