Wikigacha Turns Wikipedia Articles Into the Collectible Cards Everyone Wants to Pull

Click on the Wikigacha button, and five collectible cards appear on the screen. Each one is a full Wikipedia article condensed into a collectible, complete with the title, a small portion of the text, and all of the statistics extracted directly from the Wikipedia site data. People keep coming back for the quick pleasure, and whether you wind up with something famous or completely obscure, the outcome is always surprising.

Packs just keep regenerating, one each minute, until you have ten in the queue. When you do a quick daily job or watch a 30-second advertisement, the counter will fill up again. Open ten packs in a row, and the following one is guaranteed to contain at least one card of super rare quality or higher, so the chase does not feel rigged or unfair because you must purchase something to advance. Rarity is associated with a score that assesses how well a Wikipedia page is written and cited, based on the number of views and citations. Cards range from very common to legend rare, and you won’t see many of those because there are only about nine thousand of them in existence, hidden amid the six million+ pages on Wikipedia. Getting one of those is a true celebration.

The strength of your card in combat is determined by the number of visits to the original Wikipedia site as well as the article’s word count. The rarer the card, the more health it has, thus you should definitely aim for those while putting together a squad. Battles appear in a variety of ways. There’s the daily raid boss, a formidable opponent that must be defeated round by round until his health bar reaches zero. There are also player vs. player contests where users can throw their teams against each other and show off their cards, as well as team battles where you and your friends may team up to take on larger tasks.

Every card contains a link that takes you directly to the Wikipedia page; simply tap it, and the whole article appears in a new tab. So you might draw a card about the Red Hot Chili Peppers, followed by one about bariatric surgery, and both will take you straight to the details.

Harusugi, a mobile app developer in Japan, created the game as a hobby project and released it in February, and it quickly took off in Japan before spreading around the world, largely due to people telling their friends and posting on social media. The game is free, with no pay-to-win, so how far you get depends solely on how much time you have to dedicate to it.