How to select random alphabet letter?

So far I have only come up with choosing one of 26 shuffled cards, or a spinner wheel marked with 26 pie wedges. Using dice seems to be out, but I was wondering if anyone has encountered a suitable mechanic?

How about a combined system? Everyone draws a card which has, say, 4 letters, each in a unique color. One person rolls a colored die and everyone has to use the corresponding letter.

A system like this can also help you weight certain letter combinations. If your game is based on spelling -- like Scrabble or Word Thief -- you'll need to skew your distribution to keep it playable.

I can imagine holding a hand of 7 or so cards and hoping the die comes up yellow so I can spell 'widgets', but if blue comes up I have 'iitylgh'.

Mark

edit
You could also place the letters into a rectangular grid and roll "row and column" dice (this assumes you just need one letter per round and you're not holding onto them from round to round). You would have to fudge the table a bit. If you can afford to lose 1 letter, you could make a 5x5 grid. If you need all 26, you could go with a 4x8 grid with 6 "roll again" squares (or maybe 4 "roll again" and 2 "wild" squares, or whatever).

Can more than one player get the same letter each turn? A spinner would allow this, but drawing from a deck of cards would not (unless the cards are immediately returned to the deck and reshuffled).

K.

Cards are probably the most cost efficient method.

Take 2 normal 6-sided dice.

Keep one labelled 1 2 3 4 5 6.

Label the other one 0 6 12 18 24 30.

You now have a 1-36 random number generator with even odds for every result.

Assign a number from 1-26 to every letter of the alphabet. This leaves you with the numbers 25-36 left over. Assign them to the letters: E T A O I N S R H L, which are the 10 most common in English.

Make a chart which shows the players which numbers = which letters.

Clean up your chart so that it's a bit more player-friendly (e.g move the "doubles" together), and you're ready to go. It'll look like this:

Now you've got a simple, cost-effective system ( 2 dice and a simple chart) for determining random letter generation which even allows more common letters to come up more frequently. What do you think?

~Josh

Now I understand why outsidelime is a lousy Tikal player. He spends all his energy thinking up cool stuff like this.

Alternativly while reading his post I was thinking that 1 to 26 would equal A to Z and 27 to 36 could equal 0 to 9 for some need.

- Dwight

Another way would be to make a circular board with a letter in each square. For each turn roll 3d6 and move your pawn around the circle which indicate the selected letter. This way, you know that some letter cannot be spawned until the next turn, because you can't roll less than 3 and more than 18, which can make some sort of strategy thinking. If you want some letter to be selected more often make, some letter have 2 squares. Spreading the vowels and identical letters is also a good idea.

Hey!

I'm a half-decent Tikal player, thank you very much.

And thanks... that 1-36 even-odds system is pretty cool, huh? Just came to me one day. You can keep increasing it by adding more dice, too. With 3 dice labelled
1 2 3 4 5 6
0 6 12 18 24 30
0 36 72 108 144 180
you get a 1-216 even-odds generator. Not that I have come up with a real use for such a thing... but the concept is pretty neat.

~Josh

If the cards themselves have letters on them, why not flip the first card after all the hand cards are dealt and have that be the starting letter? Like how trump suits are chosen in many card games.

Or have a special letter be printed on the card's face for that purpose, like the bullet holes in "Wyatt Earp".