Wikipedia is now a gacha card game, and I challenge you to face my ultra rare German cuisine deck

Ok, so I don't mean to alarm anyone, but I think I just found my favorite game of 2026 so far. No, it's not the freshly released Marathon, despite my affinity for competitive shooters. It's not Mewgenics. It's not that viral horse game that dropped this week. It's Wikigacha, which turns Wikipedia's millions of articles into a pack-ripping, browser-based card battler. For reals.

Why am I so obsessed with something that is, admittedly, pretty basic as an actual game? Well, its constant barrage of packs (you get one free pack every minute, so keep that tab open and switch back regularly) will scratch even the most severe of gacha itches. The cards are put into rarity tiers based on their ranking per WikiRank, which evaluates the quality and popularity of a Wikipedia article at any given time. There are seven tiers of rarity in Wikigacha, ranging from grey 'commons' to elusive, purple 'legend rares.'

The constant pack opening and collecting are of course big draws for any card game, but it's the hilarious randomness of the cards you pull, their often surprising rarities, and their various attack and defense stats that have had me glued to it all morning. A golden ultra rare card tied to the Wikipedia page about German cuisine? Thrilling. A blue super rare based on the 2001 NFL Draft? Nice. It also turns out Bollywood actress Tabu has a sky high defense stat of 14,000. Meta.

Your entire collection of cards (which quickly grows thanks to how swiftly the 60-second pack timer refreshes) is displayed in a handy, sortable database, and it's genuinely surreal looking back on some of the weird people, places, and topics you've pulled a card on. Every tenth pack you open is also a special gold pack, where you're guaranteed at least one blue 'super rare' card or better.

However, Wikigacha goes beyond mindless pack-ripping. There are a few autobattler modes too. As well as putting a single card against a randomly matched opponent, you can build a five-card deck to compete with, or take on a daily Raid Battle that features one boss card with an enormous health bar. You can only use a card once per 24 hours when facing the boss, so you've got to keep flinging your collection at it throughout the day until its HP hits zero. Remarkably, given PCGamesN's adoration of Valve's games, today's raid boss was an ultra rare Half Life: Alyx card. I kid you not.

As was reported by Automaton, which put me onto Wikigacha earlier today, this is the work of a single dev from Japan known as 'harusugi', and it's been quite popular over there for the last couple of weeks. Now, it's going viral on social media and it's being picked up more widely.

I can't lie, I'm obsessed with this. I said earlier that this is my favorite game of 2026 so far, and in this very moment, I mean it - a game hasn't made me laugh like this all year. I concede that it will probably struggle to keep me in its grasp with its current level of complexity, but some more sophisticated visuals and battle systems could make me stick around. Plus, I might have to cut ties - this is far too addictive a game to be accessible in my work browser… If you're wondering why I missed today's meeting, boss, now you know.

At the very least, I need to keep playing until I pull a purple 'legend rare' card. I've got plenty of gold ultras, but I'm so far missing the highest-rarity card type from my collection. I've got my fingers crossed that, when the moment does arrive, it's at least as bizarre and random as my '1956 in wrestling' card…