Thanks to reporting from Automata, a new card collecting game has taken PC Gamer by storm, and I'm not talking about Slay the Spire 2 (that has also taken us by storm). I'm talking about Wikigacha, a browser-based game where you open packs to collect little cards corresponding to Wikipedia articles.
The Macombs Dam Bridge, Elizabeth II, the Gouzenko Affair, these are but a few of the crown jewels in my collection so far. Wikipedia's all-encompassing nature means my coworkers and I have unfortunately secured a few collar-tuggers as well: News writer Lincoln Carpenter is the not-exactly-proud owner of a Religious views of Adolf Hitler, while I have stoically accepted the burden of School segregation in the United States.
This game is so devious: It's such a good parody of the gacha genre, where you're usually opening up packs of doe-eyed anime ladies of either the "big sword" or "equine" variety. But replacing them with Wikipedia articles injects gacha with the addicting quality of a Wikipedia rabbit hole—you can lie to yourself that you're learning something here. Instead of opening up 40 tabs out of nowhere, I'm getting stuff like Estonia national football team results (2020-present) served up fresh by Wikigacha's deliciously tactile card packs.
There's even a "battle" system: A card's attack is determined by its article's popularity, while the defense is derived from its length. You can use your cards to challenge daily "raid bosses," rare cards that you face off against in an attrition autobattle, your own cards slowly chipping away at a big health pool. I took down Operation Catechism, while PCG senior editor Chris Livingston was confronted with the fearsome sight of Bariatric surgery.
Wikigacha also has what feels like the opposite of predatory monetization. You get 10 packs to open per day, with that counter refilling at a brisk rate of one per minute. You can watch an ad to refill straight back to 10, but I can't tell if the implementation is universally borked, or just outside of the creator's native Japan: I've been faced with a placeholder from a Japanese ad company each time I've tried it.
I love this weird little website, and my only complaints are its minimal use of generative AI—it used an LLM to produce Magic-style italicized flavor text for rare cards, a great bit sullied by a distasteful technology—and how much Wikigacha is tanking my productivity when I've got stuff to do.
