ToolwebHow to use this tool
- Enter distinct participant names and the desired team count.
- Optionally add keep-apart pairs in the form Name | Name.
- Make teams, inspect each roster and size, then copy or save the result as CSV.
Separate a pair while balancing a group
- Input and settings
- Six people; two teams; Mina | Jun must stay apart
- Result
- Two teams of three; Mina and Jun are on different teams
If the participant count does not divide evenly, team sizes differ by at most one person.
Balance and keep-apart rules
Balance refers to headcount: ten people in three teams produce sizes four, three and three, with the larger-team position shuffled by the seed. Numbers or labels inside a name are not treated as gender, skill or seniority scores; people must review the result when skill balance matters.
A keep-apart rule places | between two registered names and requires those people to be on different teams. One person may appear in multiple rules. Up to 100 people, 2–20 teams and 300 rules are supported; repeated copies of a rule are merged.
Handle impossible or difficult conditions
Without constraints, names are uniformly shuffled and partitioned by team capacity. With rules, a bounded backtracking search handles the most connected participants first. This finds an assignment that respects the rules but does not sample all valid team configurations with equal probability.
Exhausting the search without a solution and reaching the 50,000-node search bound produce different messages. Reaching the bound does not prove impossibility. Reduce the constraints or increase the team count to retry; rules are never silently discarded to manufacture a successful result.
Common questions
Can there be fewer people than teams?
Empty teams are not created, so the team count cannot exceed the participant count. Reduce the number of teams for a small group rather than duplicating names to fill seats.
Can I reproduce these teams at a later meeting?
Import the settings JSON into the same algorithm version to apply the identical seed, roster and constraints. Adding people or changing rules defines a new assignment and changes its settings hash.