Draw names without the hat

Shuffling a list of names and handing each person the next one is easy. Doing it so that nobody draws themselves is easy too. The one that catches people out is mutual pairs — A draws B and B draws A — which a random shuffle produces all the time. In a group of four it happens about a third of the time, and when it does the whole thing stops feeling like a game.

Rivori draws one loop through everybody: you buy for the next person along, all the way round and back to the start. Nobody gets themselves and nobody gets the person who got them, not because we check afterwards but because a loop cannot contain either.

Couples who already buy for each other. The two who had each other last year. The pair who will absolutely make it weird. Mark them before you draw and the loop is built around them.

Rule out too much and it stops being possible, so Rivori works it out while you type and tells you before you press the button rather than after. It doesn’t stop you — a set of rules that can’t work with four people is often fine with the six who haven’t joined yet.

Not the other players, and not the organiser either. Exactly one thing in the entire system can hand out an assignment and it can only ever hand out yours; there is no argument anywhere that lets anybody ask about somebody else’s.

That has a price and we pay it on purpose: an organiser gets no “who has peeked yet” list. Running the exchange makes you a participant with extra buttons, not an administrator with a view of the answers.

What you mark as bought is private in the same way. It is kept separately from the claims on ordinary shared boards, so ticking off your person’s present never shows up on their own board or to anybody they share it with.

Drawing freezes the roster, the ruled-out pairs and everyone’s linked board, because a departure breaks the loop and a relink orphans what somebody has already bought. The budget, date and house rules stay editable — those are the things that actually change.

If somebody does leave, Rivori says the exchange needs redrawing rather than quietly re-pairing people behind your back. And you can undo a draw entirely, which clears what everyone has marked as bought — the confirmation says so, because that is the part people forget.

You can also set a date after which the pairings unseal, so everyone finds out who had them. It is off unless you turn it on, and anybody joining is told before they join — it changes what they’re agreeing to. This is the sort of thing Rivori is careful about generally; the privacy policy is written the same way.

Yes — that is the name most people know it by, and it does that job properly. It just isn’t only that. The same tool runs a leaving present, a birthday whip-round, Diwali, a book swap, or an office thing in June, and none of those want a snowman on them.