How secret santa pairing works
Paste the participant names, one per line, and the tool assigns every person someone to give a gift to. The result is a derangement: a shuffled mapping where nobody draws themselves, every person gives exactly one gift, and every person receives exactly one. Two-person groups get an obvious forced swap; larger groups get a genuinely random pairing rather than a predictable rotation of the name list.
The optional exclusions list handles real-world constraints — couples, flatmates, close relatives who should not draw each other. Write one pair per line like "Alice, Bob" and the exclusion applies in both directions: Alice cannot draw Bob and Bob cannot draw Alice. A backtracking search then finds an assignment satisfying every constraint at once, or reports clearly when the exclusions make a valid draw impossible — for example, two participants who are excluded from each other in a two-person exchange.
Enter a seed to make the draw reproducible: the same names, exclusions and seed always produce the same assignments, which is useful when the organizer needs to re-check who draws whom or re-send a lost message. Without a seed, every draw is fresh. Copy the results as a plain list and message each participant privately, or read them out with each giver's receiver kept secret — nothing is uploaded anywhere, so the draw stays between you and your browser.