About Earth Gacha: every card is a real wildlife sighting

Earth Gacha is a free browser gacha game. Unlike most card games, nobody designed these cards: every card you pull is a real animal, plant or fungus that a real person photographed on a particular day, in a particular place.

Each card shows where and when the photo was taken and who took it, with a link to the original observation. Rarity isn’t something we decided either. It comes from how many times that species has ever been recorded on Earth.

Where the cards come from

All cards come from GBIF, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, an international data network funded by governments that brings together museum specimens, scientific surveys and public observations and makes them freely available.

Earth Gacha only draws from records that are human observations with a photo. On November 2, 2026 there were 224,360,158 of them. Most come from a handful of citizen science platforms:

In other words, most of the cards you pull were taken by ordinary people with a phone or camera, uploaded to a platform like iNaturalist and identified by its community.

What happens when you open a pack

1. Your browser asks GBIF directly for a few random photographed observations. Our server doesn’t take part in the draw, and there is no pre-made card pool.
2. For each record, it asks GBIF how many records the species has worldwide and in how many countries, and asks iNaturalist and GBIF for the species’ name in each language.
3. It works out the rarity from the record count (see how rarity works) and deals you 5 cards.

Because every draw is live, your cards won’t match anyone else’s, and the same species can come back in a photo by someone else.

What “rare” means here

In Earth Gacha, “rare” means rarely recorded, which isn’t quite the same as scarce in the wild. The Mallard has 32,840,285 records on GBIF and is the most ordinary N card there is. Titulcia eximia, a moth from Malaysia, has just 50 records worldwide and is a UR.

A species can have few records because it really is scarce, or simply because it lives where few people go, or because it’s tiny and few people set out to photograph it. Pulling a UR means you’re looking at one of only a handful of times anyone has ever documented that species.

Why it exists

Every day, thousands of people photograph wildlife and upload their observations. Scientists use that data to study where species live, how climate change is moving them and how invasive species spread. For most people, though, this enormous database is invisible.

Earth Gacha uses the fun of pulling cards to put those real records in front of more people: how many living things we can’t even name, which species almost nobody has photographed, and who found them where. If it makes you want to go out and photograph something yourself, read how to get your own photos into the game.

Photos and names

Photos belong to their photographers. Each card’s caption shows the photographer and the license (for example CC BY-NC 4.0) and links to the original record. We only show photos as their licenses allow and never alter or sell them. Species names come from iNaturalist and GBIF; when a species has no common name in your language yet, you’ll see the English or scientific name.

Money and ads

Earth Gacha is completely free and has no purchases of any kind. You get 1 pack back every 5 minutes and can hold up to 10. When you run out, you can choose to watch a rewarded video ad for 3 more. 90% of the site’s ad revenue is donated to iNaturalist; the other 10% pays for servers and other running costs. For how your data is handled, see the privacy policy.