Magic 8 Ball — Online Fortune Ball

Random. The answer is picked with crypto.getRandomValues — the browser’s own cryptographic generator — and the ragged tail of the 32-bit word is rejected rather than folded in. Without that rejection a remainder by 20 would give the first sixteen answers slightly more weight, and in the classic set the last four are the negative ones, so the ball would quietly lean towards “yes”. The classic proportions are kept as well: 10 affirmative, 5 non-committal, 5 negative, exactly as in the real toy.

In sets of five answers or more the previous answer is excluded from the next draw: “Ask again later” twice in a row reads as a broken page rather than as chance. In sets smaller than five the rule is off — on the “Yes or no only” set it would turn the ball into a strict alternation of yes, no, yes, no, which is perfectly predictable. There, every throw is independent.

Most likely motion access has not been granted — on an iPhone the browser asks for it the first time you tap the ball, and if that dialog was dismissed, shaking will not work, though tapping will. The second reason: the ball tells a shake from a single knock and waits for at least three oscillations within 0.9 seconds. One sharp swing is deliberately not counted. The hint under the ball always states what actually works on your device.

No. The note appears after the draw and affects nothing — it is simply the fact that you have asked this exact phrase before, and what the ball said then. Questions are compared ignoring case, extra spaces and a trailing question mark. The entries live in this browser’s local storage, so they will not be there on another device; you can clear them in the “What the ball has already said” panel.

Because that is what is inside the real thing. A die with twenty triangular faces floats in the dark fluid, and the classic ball has exactly twenty answers — one per face. Here the die is built honestly: 12 vertices, 20 equilateral faces, tumbling for real and pressing against the glass with the face the generator chose. That triangular face also sets how long an answer may be: a word longer than about twelve characters no longer reads on it, which is why the classic answers are so short.

Yes, that is what host mode is for. Turn it on and pick the next answer from the list — nothing changes on screen, and the ball gives that answer once before going back to drawing at random. There is also a trick for playing in a room: with host mode on, touching the left edge of the ball gives the first answer in the set and the right edge the last. While the mode is off, nothing can steer the answer.

Yes — there is a mode for it. Pick "A or B" in the answer-set list, write two to six options — "pizza" and "sushi", "stay" and "go" — and the ball names one of them: the winner is printed on the face of the die like any other answer. The same cryptographic generator does the picking, and it is uniform: neither the first option nor the last has an edge. Six is the ceiling — past that the winning line stops fitting the triangular face, and an answer you cannot read is not an answer.