A Christmas gift draw that's actually fair
A fair Christmas gift draw has to meet two simple-sounding rules that are surprisingly hard to guarantee with slips of paper in a bowl: nobody should draw their own name, and nobody — not even the organizer — should be able to guess who drew whom before the gifts get opened.
With paper, the first rule usually means an awkward do-over in front of everyone ("hang on, I drew myself, let me try again"), and the second is close to impossible to enforce: someone folds the slips, someone hands them out, and it only takes one look or one hesitation to give the whole thing away.
Qui pige qui? solves both problems at the root: an algorithm runs the draw, never a person, and it guarantees automatically that no participant ends up with their own name. You can add exclusions for couples too, and re-run the draw as many times as you need before the big day.
Ready in 2 minutes · free for up to 12 participants · no account
How the draw actually works, behind the scenes
You enter the full list of participants — names and emails — in whatever order is easiest.
You add any exclusions: pairs of people who should never draw each other, typically couples or roommates.
When the draw runs, the algorithm builds a chain of assignments where everyone gives to someone else, never to themselves, and never to an excluded partner — solving for every constraint at once, not one pair at a time the way you'd have to by hand.
Once the assignment is set, each participant gets their secret link by email. The organizer never sees the results at any point — only confirmation that the draw took place.
Free for up to 12 participants. After that, $5.99 CAD once, for an unlimited number of participants.
Why exclusions change everything
Without exclusions, a fully random draw can easily have one partner draw the other — statistically rare in a huge group, but genuinely common in an eight-person family with three couples in it. The gift ends up redundant with whatever the couple's already planning to get each other.
Adding exclusions before you run the draw removes that risk entirely: the calculation rules out the pairs you've flagged from the start, without making the draw any less fair for everyone else. Nobody else needs to know exclusions exist — the draw just looks perfectly normal to the group.
Redoing the draw without breaking anything
Someone drops out at the last minute? Someone else joins the night before the party? Rather than redealing paper slips by hand and risking someone remembering an old assignment, you just re-run the draw online. New secret links go out to everyone, and the old results are wiped clean — as if the first draw never happened.
This matters as much for fairness as for convenience: since the new draw runs through the same algorithm, every constraint — no self-draws, no excluded pairs — gets rechecked from scratch, not patched on top of the old result. Whoever joined last gets treated exactly like everyone who signed up on day one.
Frequently asked questions
- How does the site guarantee nobody draws their own name?
- The draw algorithm rules that out before it even calculates the assignments — it's not a check done afterward, it's a constraint built into the calculation itself.
- What exactly is an exclusion?
- It's a pair of participants who should never draw each other — typically couples. You add it with one click before the draw, and the calculation accounts for it automatically.
- Can the organizer see the draw results?
- No, never. The organizer only sees whether each participant has opened their secret link, not the name they drew. Everyone gets the same privacy, including whoever created the exchange.
- Can the draw be re-run afterward?
- Yes, any time before the exchange. A new draw overwrites the previous one and sends fresh secret links to every participant.
- Does the draw work with an odd number of participants?
- Yes, the algorithm adjusts regardless of the number of participants or exclusions, as long as a valid solution exists — which covers the vast majority of groups, even with several couples excluded.