Prize Wheel

The brief, the build, and the result.

Prize Wheel is the kiosk activation Remiam built for two co-sponsoring financial brands in the premium hospitality lounge at a major golf championship across eight days in July 2026. The visible experience is deliberately simple: a masked portrait screen shows only a circular wheel, staff unlock it with a shared password, the guest swipes, and the wheel decelerates onto a prize. Everything underneath exists to make that moment trustworthy. The wheel is not fair chance — it animates to an outcome an allocation engine has already chosen, drawing each prize with weight equal to the units still available and decrementing as it goes. Over the run that reproduces the agency's prize plan exactly: no oversell, no early grand prize, no day that runs dry before it should. Per-prize gates hold rare items back until a given spin number or date; unclaimed stock carries forward automatically instead of being lost to a per-day bucket; and when only gated stock remains the engine returns a free 'better luck next time' so the wheel keeps turning and the day still progresses. The architecture question that mattered most was where the outcome authority lives. A venue lounge is a hostile network environment, and a stalled wheel in front of a queue is the one failure the client could not accept. So the kiosk became offline-first: it loads the whole plan once, runs the pure TypeScript engine locally in the browser, writes every spin to IndexedDB, and syncs to the server whenever there is a connection. The kiosk is the source of truth; the server is the record, the backup, and the thing that powers the admin dashboard. That is only safe because there is exactly one kiosk — two would diverge and oversell — so the single-device constraint is a deliberate part of the design, not an accident of it. The admin side is where the operations team actually lived for eight days: a live dashboard on Supabase Realtime, per-prize inventory bars, an editable allocation calendar showing released / taken / available / carried-over per day, a wheel-layout editor mapping physical wedges to prizes, a filterable activity log that merges every spin with every admin change and its field-level diff, and a full-event simulator that replays the whole run on demand to prove each prize hits its exact total before anyone stakes a live day on it. A spreadsheet import wizard reads new revisions of the agency's allocation workbook, cross-verifies every sheet against the others, previews the diff, and applies days, quantities and wedges in one atomic go — so a plan change the night before an event is a two-minute upload rather than a redeploy. Two spin modes ship: the weighted algorithm above, and a fixed-wins mode that follows an imported schedule row by row when the client wants a deterministic sequence. Over the eight days the kiosk took 3,850 spins and handed out 1,208 physical prizes — 97.1% of the stock allocated to it — peaking at 794 spins in a single hour, roughly thirteen a minute, with zero fallback outcomes and no wheel stall. Brand, event and prize details are intentionally generalised.