How to Play

Five minutes to learn, a lifetime of explaining to coworkers why you pulled left-pad three times.

Repo Gacha is a free browser card game where every card is a real, public GitHub repository. You pull cards, collect the ones you love (or love to hate), build a five-card Stack, and send it into battle against themed boss stacks or a friend's link. There are no accounts and nothing to buy. Everything below is the whole game.

Pulling cards

You get 30 free pulls every day. The counter resets at midnight in your own time zone, so there is no global "server reset" to stay up for. Pull one card at a time with PULL ×1, or ten at once with PULL ×10, which flips a grid of ten cards and then shows you the best one. Your progress lives in your browser's local storage: clear your site data and you start fresh.

Rarities and rates

Every pull rolls a rarity first, then a card of that rarity. The published rates never change:

UR (Ultra Rare): 2%
SSR (S. Super Rare): 5%
SR (Super Rare): 13%
R (Rare): 30%
N (Normal): 50%

Rarity follows how famous a repository is, not how good it is. Some of the funniest cards in the game are N.

Pity

If nine pulls in a row come up below SR, the tenth is guaranteed to be SR or better. The counter under the rates shows how many pulls are left until the guarantee. Pity carries over between days, so a bad Tuesday still counts toward a good Wednesday.

Reading a card: ATK and DEF

ATK grows with the repository's GitHub stars and DEF grows with the size of the repository. Both use a logarithmic scale from 1 to 99, so a project with a million stars is strong but not a thousand times stronger than one with a thousand. Every card also has an archetype, such as Mega Star, Sleeping Giant, Tiny Legend or Cursed Name, which gives it one small skill in battle, plus a one-line roast on the card face.

Your Stack

A Stack is your team: up to five cards with a total cost of 12 or less. Common cards are cheap and famous ones are expensive, so you can't just bring five legends. Order matters. Slot 1 is PROD: it takes every hit until it goes down, and then the next card is "hotfix deployed" into production. The other slots wait in line as dependencies, and some skills buff the cards behind them.

Combos

Cards carry attributes like their language, their package ecosystem and how they failed. Put the right attributes together and combos switch on. A few of the ones you'll meet:

Monorepo: three or more cards from one ecosystem get sturdier, once CI finally passes.
Graveyard Shift: with two abandoned repos, the first card that goes down comes back as a fork.
Rewrite It In Rust: with a Rust card in the Stack, a tiny card that dies is replaced by its -rs rewrite.
left-pad Cascade: when left-pad goes down, every npm card on the board finds out it depended on it.
The Rebrand: a famous lobster renames every AI card, on both sides, and nobody ships anything that round.
Read The Docs: the kernel tells AI cards to read the documentation before they act.

The Stack tab shows which combos are active, which are one card away, and which threats your Stack is exposed to.

Battles

Battles are automatic: you pick the Stack, the game plays it out. The two PROD cards hit each other every round, skills fire, deprecated cards drop out, and the result is written up as an incident log, complete with a root cause. Fight the boss stacks (from a weekend side project up to Dependency Hell), or copy a challenge link and let a friend fight your Stack with theirs. Battles are deterministic, so a replay link shows exactly the same fight. Links made with an older version of the rules still play; the game just tells you the result may differ from the original.

Sharing

Every card has a link and a PNG export. Copy the share text, post the image, start an argument about whether your favourite framework deserved SR.

The small print

Repo Gacha is a fan-made game. It is not affiliated with GitHub or with any of the projects shown on the cards. Card data comes from public repository metadata. If you maintain a project and want a card corrected or removed, see the FAQ or contact us.