Ben 10 Aliens Wheel

Sixty-seven aliens sit on this wheel, running from the original ten through forms that show up much later in the franchise. Heatblast and Four Arms share the same odds as Toepick and Gax. One press of SPIN pulls one transformation.

The original ten are buried in here

Heatblast, Wildmutt, Diamondhead, XLR8, Grey Matter, Four Arms, Stinkfly, Ripjaws, Upgrade and Ghostfreak all appear, and they sit in that order at the top of the list. After that the ordering follows roughly when each alien turned up rather than anything alphabetical.

That means the first ten slices are the ones most people can name and the remaining fifty-seven are where the wheel gets interesting. A spin is about eighty-five percent likely to land outside the original set. Toepick, Walkatrout, Mole-Stache and The Worst are all here at the same odds as XLR8, which is the point of a wheel this long. Nobody names those from memory.

The naming gets stranger as the list goes on

Early entries describe a power or a body plainly. Heatblast, Diamondhead and Four Arms all tell you what you are getting. Later entries stop doing that. Juryrigg, Bullfrag, Slapback and Pesky Dust are puns first and descriptions second, and The Worst is a joke name that describes nothing at all.

A few use compression that only works if you say them out loud. Eatle collapses eat and beetle. Armodrillo does the same with armadillo and drill. Chamalien and Amphibian both bury the word alien inside another word, and Amphibian in particular reads as an ordinary English noun until you notice what it is doing. Anyone using this wheel for a drawing prompt will find the later half generates less obvious subjects than the early half, simply because the names give away less.

Spelling and formatting are inconsistent

The list uses lowercase in three places where the rest of the entries capitalize. Grey matter, Ball weevil and Spitter break the pattern, and Grey Matter and Ball Weevil are normally written with both words capitalized. Grey matter also uses the British spelling of grey, which is correct for the character name even though the rest of the article uses US English.

Kickin Hawk is missing its apostrophe, which is usually written Kickin' Hawk. Snare-oh, Mole-Stache and Shock Rock show three different approaches to joining two parts of a name across the same list. None of this affects the spin, though a group searching for reference art will get better results after fixing the capitalization in the Entries panel.

Some results end the game immediately

If the wheel is being used for a challenge or a matchup, two entries break it. Alien X is written as effectively unbeatable in the show, and Atomix and Way Big sit close behind. Spinning any of those against a random opponent ends the discussion before it starts.

The opposite problem exists too. The Worst, Toepick and Pesky Dust win through circumstances rather than force, which makes them hard to use in a straight matchup. Groups running versus rounds tend to pull Alien X out of the pool and leave the rest, since removing it fixes most of the imbalance on its own. That edit takes a few seconds in the Entries panel, and the wheel redraws with sixty-six slices as soon as it is gone.

Using the wheel

The list sits in the Entries panel next to the wheel, the wheel redraws whenever the entries change, and one press of the center SPIN button gives one result. Nothing else needs configuring.

Drawing challenges are the strongest fit. Sixty-seven designs give a lot of range, and the spread between Crashhopper, Chromastone and Big Chill means a spin rarely produces the same kind of shape twice. Artists running a daily prompt can spin once a session and work through the list without repeating for two months.

Transformation challenges work in games and roleplay, where the spin decides which form gets used for a round. Favorite-alien arguments are the third use, and the wheel handles those better than a conversation does, because sixty-seven is far more than anyone recalls unprompted and the spin surfaces forms that would otherwise never come up.

Groups that only watched one series will want to trim. Cutting to the original ten, or to a single show's roster, is a quick edit, and the result shares as a single link so everyone spins the same version rather than assembling a slightly different list from memory.