What is Dino Derby?
What is Dino Derby? 🦖
Sell-out breaks decided by racing dinosaurs. Live, fair, and slightly ridiculous.
🎲 The race decides everything
🔒 Locked to randomness nobody controls
🌋 Real lava lamps involved (honestly)
🦖 The short version
Buy a spot on one of our Random breaks. When it sells out, we hit one button live on stream and a herd of pixel dinosaurs legs it down the track for about 40 seconds.
Your spot number is a finishing position. Every team in the break has a dino in the race — whatever crosses the line in your position, that's your team.
No hat. No bingo balls. No "hang on while I shuffle this list". One race, done — and your win goes straight onto your order, so the notes tell you exactly what your spot got.
🏁 How the finishing order works
Simple: position in the race = spot number. The dino that finishes 1st is Spot 1's team. Finishes 2nd, Spot 2's. All the way down the field.
Two examples:
Got Spot 4? Whatever team's dino finishes 4th — that's your team.
Got Spot 1? The winner of the race is yours.
There are always exactly as many spots as dinos, so every number lands a team and nobody misses out. It all happens live and in public, so you watch your number get its team in real time.
🦕 The dinos
They gallop. They stomp. They roar. Some of them run like they've had a heavy weekend. Up to a hundred of them can pile out of the gates at once — in football kits, no less — and every one of them is carrying somebody's result.
So far, exactly one of them has a name: Frankie. The rest are waiting on you lot — naming competition coming soon, so keep an eye on the stream and the WhatsApp group.
🎲 Nothing is decided before the race
Before the gates open there's no list, no draw done behind the scenes, nothing written down anywhere. The teams are the runners. You've got a number. Nothing connects the two until the dinos cross the line.
The race isn't showing you a result we already knew. The race IS the result.
👐 Why we built it this way.
Most breaks are randomised with third-party tools — wheels, shufflers, name pickers. Plenty of those tools offer weighting as a built-in option, and from the outside there's no way to tell whether it's switched on. We're not saying anyone uses it — we're saying nobody watching can know. We didn't want to be in the "trust me" business, so we built a draw with nothing to switch on: the result comes from a number nobody controls and nobody's seen.
🌋 Right — the lava lamps
The randomness that drives every race comes from outside rbreaks entirely. It's a public service run by separate organisations all over the world, pumping out fresh random numbers every few seconds. Nobody controls it — not us, not them, nobody.
One of those organisations is Cloudflare, and part of their randomness comes from filming a wall of lava lamps in their office lobby. The blobs never do the same thing twice, and that never-the-same-twice is fed into the numbers.
So yes: your break is partly decided by hot wax floating about in San Francisco. We did not make that up.
Ours are pixels. Cloudflare's are real.
Want the full story on the lamps? Cloudflare explain it themselves here — it's a surprisingly fun read.
🔒 The clever bit
When we press the race button, the number that decides the race doesn't exist yet, turns up as the race is running. A number that doesn't exist yet can't be predicted, picked or planned around — by anyone.
🎁 What you win
IF your spot pulls, you get everything from it except base cards. A pull is never guaranteed — that's the nature of any break — but whatever your spot does pull is yours to keep.
Base cards from every spot are donated to our charity partner Goals4Girls, getting more girls into football.
And remember — this isn't just for fillers. Any Random break works the same way: sells out, race runs, done.
Browse current breaks → Browse filler spots →
🔍 Don't take our word for it
Every race can be checked after it's run — which number it used, and that the finishing order came from that number and nothing else.
We'll have this up very soon!
You'll probably never need it. It'll always be there.
🤝 Questions? Ask us anything
How spots work, what the lava lamps are about, which dino to emotionally attach to — the rbreaks WhatsApp group is full of people who were new to this once. No silly questions.
❓ FAQ
Is Dino Derby actually random?
Yes. The number that decides each race comes from a public source nobody controls — including us — and it doesn't exist until after the race button is pressed.
Can anyone influence who wins?
No. The number that decides each race comes from outside rbreaks and doesn't exist until after the button's pressed. There's nothing behind the scenes to weight, tweak or nudge — for anyone.
What have lava lamps got to do with it?
Part of the world's randomness supply genuinely comes from a wall of lava lamps in Cloudflare's lobby. The blobs never repeat, and our races run on numbers fed by that kind of chaos.
How do I know what I won?
Watch the race live — and it's written onto your order automatically. Your order notes will say exactly what your spot won.