RoundRoBin — guide

How to plan multi-round breakout groups without repeat pairings.

The task

You run a workshop with 24–40 people. You want several rounds of small-group discussion, and you want people to meet people they have not already met. Doing this by hand — or with a simple "shuffle" button — drifts toward the same pairs meeting again and again, because random reshuffling repeats pairs often: with 24 people in 4 groups, roughly half the pairs in round two have already met.

How to do it with RoundRoBin

  1. Paste the names, one per line. Duplicates are kept as separate people with numbers (Alice, Alice (2)) — check the yellow note if that was not intended.
  2. Set groups and rounds. 2–10 groups, 1–5 rounds. Sizes are as even as the maths allows (they never differ by more than one person).
  3. Pin the people who must not move — click a name and pin them to a numbered group; they stay in that group every round (typical for a facilitator or a co-host per table).
  4. Generate. The tool runs many random restarts per round and keeps the arrangement with the fewest repeated pairs against everything already scheduled.
  5. Read the two repeat numbers. "Repeated pairs" counts how many different pairs meet more than once. "Extra meetings" adds up every additional encounter beyond the first. Both are shown, because one alone is misleading — and can be checked row by row in the per-person table.
  6. Check, adjust, export. An independent verifier confirms every person appears exactly once per round and pins held; then copy as text, download CSV (Excel-safe) or JSON, or print.

An honest example: 24 people, 6 groups, 4 rounds

Before the event: 6 tables of 4. After four rounds the tool reported about 40 repeated pairs out of the 276 possible pairs — far fewer than naive reshuffling produces, and each row is verifiable in the per-person table. The tool says "best of random restarts", not "optimal": we do not claim a mathematically perfect schedule, and it never claims one.

Limits worth knowing