If you're ever on Wheel of Fortune and make it to the Bonus Round, this dashboard will help you choose a category and the best letters to help you solve the puzzle. Check it out here: http://zkornbluth.github.io/WheelOfFortune

At the end of the regular puzzles in every Wheel of Fortune episode, the highest-scoring contestant advances to the Bonus Round - a single puzzle for a chance at an extra prize. The contestant gets to select the category from a set of three options, then they're shown a puzzle board and the standard letters R, S, T, L, N, and E are automatically revealed. The contestant then chooses three more consonants and one more vowel (and a fourth consonant if they've earned a Wild Card). Once those are revealed, they get 10 seconds to solve the puzzle.

The goal of this dashboard is to help contestants choose a category and their letters for the best chance at correctly solving the Bonus Round puzzle.

I obtained this data from two sources:

• https://www.angelfire.com/mi4/malldirectories/wheel/wheelbonus.html
• https://andynwof.wordpress.com/

Games September 2001 - March 2016 are from the first source. Games April 2016 - June 2025 are from the second source.

Contestants were able to choose their Bonus Round category from three options starting in September 2017.

The dashboard displays the following graphs:

• Bonus round win rate by year
• Frequency of guessable letters (excludes RSTLNE)
• Average puzzle length by year
• Average percentage of puzzle revealed with RSTLNE by year

The dashboard includes the following configuration options:

• Selecting a start and end year filters the data used in all graphs to the games between the selected years.
• Clicking the "Show Categories" toggle changes between bar charts of categories and line graphs over time. The toggle defaults to On.
• Selecting a category under Puzzle Letter Frequency shows the frequency of guessable letters for that category's puzzles.

If you want to set it up locally, follow the instructions below.

git clone https://github.com/zkornbluth/WheelOfFortune.git
cd WheelOfFortune

The packages used are shiny, shinyWidgets, tidyverse, bslib, and scales. There are two easy ways to install these:

Option 1: Copy and paste this into the RStudio console:

install.packages("shiny")
install.packages("shinyWidgets")
install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("bslib")
install.packages("scales")

Option 2: Navigate to the Packages tab in RStudio and click "Install".

In the popup window, enter the packages separated by a space or comma and click "Install".

Click the "Run App" button in RStudio.

Wheel of fortune icon created by Freepik - Flaticon