Tyche exists because my kid wanted to run our own version of a YouTube show. We are a Disney family, and one of our favorites is Mammoth Club, where two relentlessly cheerful park obsessives walk into Walt Disney World, let a randomizer hand them a list of rides and snacks and shows, and then race to clear all of it before the day runs out. The optimized touring plan is the enemy: chance picks the day, and the fun is watching capable people surrender to it. My kid wanted to do exactly that, our way, with our own lists and our own flavor. So I built the randomizer.
It could have stayed a one-family gadget, except side projects drift. If I was already building a randomizer for our Disney days, why should it only know about Disney? So it grew up a little. Tyche now picks from any list you hand it: 27 ship with it (cuisines, dishes, Disney rides, workouts, party games) and you can build your own.
The same engine wears five animations: a slot machine, a coin, a tumbling die, a flipping card, and a rock-paper-scissors prism. The prism nods to Mammoth Club's other staple, where a dead-serious round of rock paper scissors decides who picks dinner, except Tyche's version is single-player on purpose: two people roll on their own phones and compare in person, the same ritual without one shared screen. The whole thing glows in loud neon for the most honest design reason on this entire site: my kid loves bright colors, and it is, in every way that counts, my kid's app. It is named for Τύχη, the Greek goddess of fortune, after a brief and regrettable first life as "So Random!", a name I keep around as a monument to not naming things at 11pm.
Decide, versus relieve
There are two honest positions on letting chance make your choices, and the argument between them never ends because each is right about a different kind of decision. The rationalist position is that you should decide by reasons: weigh the options, optimize, own the call. The relief position is that for trivial choices, deliberation is pure cost, a tax you pay in attention for an outcome that barely matters. The rationalist is right about the decisions that deserve reasons. The relief camp is right that most of what we agonize over does not, and that the agonizing, not the choice, is the actual problem.
Tyche lives only in the second category, and it is unapologetic about it. It will not help you choose a career. It picks dinner, so the part of you that would have spent twenty minutes on dinner can go be useful somewhere else. The value is not a better answer. It is the attention you get back. Mammoth Club worked this out long before I did: the day gets better not because chance chose well, but because you finally stopped trying to optimize it.
What the flip actually measures
Here is the part I find genuinely interesting. A coin flip is supposed to remove your preference — and instead it reveals it. The moment the coin is in the air you notice which side you are quietly rooting for, and the flash of disappointment or relief when it lands is data you did not have a second earlier.
You are not asking fortune to choose. You are using fortune to surprise your gut into admitting what it already wanted.
Used that way, the randomizer is not a decision-maker at all. It is a preference probe. I did not design that in. It is just what randomness does to a mind that thought it was indifferent, and once you notice it, the coin earns its keep even when you overrule it.
The honest part
Two admissions. First, this is the least serious thing I have built, and I will not dress it up: it is a toy, the world did not need it, and I made it anyway because it was fun and it scratched a real itch. Second, and this is the same compression-lie the embedding playground has, the five animations are pure theater. Underneath the slot machine and the prism and the tumbling die is exactly one random number generator, the same call every time. The slot does not roll differently than the coin. The variety lives entirely in the wrapper, and the wrapper exists so the metaphor of the spin matches the feel of the choice, not because it changes the odds. I think that is fine. But you should be able to see the magician's hands, even when the trick is harmless.
Tyche got temples for deciding the fates of whole cities. Using her to settle tacos versus ramen is a demotion she would probably find funny. So here is my question, and I mean it as a real one, not a closer: what is a decision you would actually hand to a coin, if you trusted yourself to read your own face when it landed? Tyche is live, it keeps nothing, every list and config lives in your browser. tyche.awrylabs.com...