How this works

The short version

You press a button. Seventy-eight rows in a database are shuffled by a seeded random number generator, as many are taken off the top as the spread calls for, and each one is written up using the meanings stored against it, picking the version of that meaning written for whatever you said you were asking about. That is the whole trick. There is nothing else going on.

The shuffle

It is a Fisher-Yates shuffle, which is the ordinary correct way to shuffle a list, run against a generator started from a seed. No card can be drawn twice in one spread. Roughly three in ten land reversed, which is fewer than a real shuffle would produce and more than most people want.

One hand a day

The seed is made from the browser you are using, the spread you chose, today's date and a secret key. Nothing you type is in it. The cards are settled the moment you arrive, so refreshing does not deal a new hand and neither does coming back after lunch.

There is no button that deals again, and that is deliberate. A reading you can re-roll until you like it is a fruit machine, and any reader would tell you the same thing. The deck shuffles at midnight, UK time, and the next morning you get a new hand.

The hand is tied to a browser rather than to a person, because there are no accounts here and nothing is trying to work out who you are. A different browser is a different visitor as far as the deck is concerned, and so is a cleared cookie jar.

Asking about something else

You can fill the form in again, and it is worth doing. The cards stay as they were and the reading is written out afresh for the new question, which is nearer to how a spread is actually read: three cards say something different depending on what you put to them. Each version gets its own link, so you can keep both.

A different spread lays out differently, because a spread is a shape of question rather than a second go at the same one.

What your details do

None of them change which cards you get. They change how the cards are written up. Four things, all of them mundane:

• What you are asking about picks which of the card's written meanings leads. Every card has a paragraph for love, work, money, yourself and a decision, as well as a general one. Ask about money and you get the money paragraph, not a general paragraph with the word money dropped into it.
• Your name is used to address you, and for nothing else.
• Your birthday is turned into a star sign, and the star sign is turned into an element: fire, water, air or earth. The reading then checks whether the cards you drew are in that element. That is a real comparison against a real draw, and it comes out "no" about as often as "yes", which is why it is worth printing.
• Your mood changes how firmly the reading is written. It does not change what it says. The Tower is the Tower whether you are feeling hopeful or hunted, and pretending otherwise would be the one genuinely dishonest thing this site could do.

What is not happening

Nothing is being divined. There is no model reading your question and deciding what you need to hear. Nobody is looking at your details and guessing anything about you. The reading feels personal because the inputs are yours, not because anything supernatural took place between the button and the page.

The part people find uncanny is usually the paragraph about the shape of the spread: how many major arcana came up, which element took it over, how many reversals. That paragraph is arithmetic. It is the least invented thing on the page, which is worth knowing.

What the cards are for

Reflection and entertainment. A tarot reading is a structured way of looking at something from an angle you were not using. That is genuinely useful and it is not the same as advice. Nothing here is guidance about your health, your money or the law, and any reading that sounds like it is should be read as the prompt it is rather than the instruction it is not.