January 2026

A game’s opening moments are make or break, especially in an age when people can quickly bounce from game to game on subscription services like Xbox Game Pass. Those opening moments, whether they’re action-packed or character-driven, have to grip you before you move on to the next game in your backlog. This weekend, Polygon is […]

With a live-service game like Diablo 4, it can often be hard to sort the wheat from the chaff of the community’s outrage cycle. That’s especially true when observing it from the outside, or even from the semi-inside if you’re an occasional, on/off player (as I am with Diablo 4). Excitement at new content and […]

There’s nothing more frustrating in Magic: The Gathering than falling prey to blue’s most annoying gimmick: the Counterspell. Blue’s entire color identity is about controlling the flow of play and manipulating both the battlefield and players’ hands with magic. For a relatively low cost, someone playing blue can counter almost any spell, regardless of how […]

Starting with the very first episode of Stranger Things, the series creators Matt and Ross Duffer used Dungeons & Dragons to both foreshadow the show’s biggest villains and explain their powers. The protagonists refer to themselves as “the party” and the metaphors have been laid on so thick there was even speculation the series finale […]

[Ed. note: This article contains full spoilers for the series finale of Stranger Things.] Something has seemed wrong since, let’s say, some time in 2016. Whatever your political, economic, or religious affiliations, there’s no denying our world has veered down a polarized path in the last decade, one that most people never saw coming in […]