A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms is the latest Game of Thrones spin-off from HBO, but it’s a drastically different show compared to anything we’ve seen before. Based on The Hedge Knight, a series of novellas written by George R.R. Martin, the series tells a much smaller and more focused story about Ser Dunk the […]

Elden Ring Nightreign players received a game-changing update on Thursday, thanks to patch 1.03.2, which has big buffs for two of the game’s Nightfarers: the Raider and Executor. But FromSoftware’s latest update to Nightreign has more than just buffs (and a nerf for fan-favorite Ironeye), with sweeping changes to relics, spells, and field bosses. One […]

Game of Thrones’ epic scope was always part of the show’s appeal. The ambitious story, sprawling across kingdoms, continents, and the cast of dozens of primary characters made HBO’s George R.R. Martin adaptation feel monumental and consequential, especially as the story narrowed down to a single massive war that would define the fate of the […]

In these days of shrinking attention spans, the success of a game is too often determined by its overture: you either capture the audience during those crucial early minutes, or you never get another chance. Developer Bethesda understood this quite some time ago, and since 1992, dramatic openings have been one of the most notable […]

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 […]

Why throw something away if you can reuse it? Where some might apply this philosophy to food packaged in glass or ceramic containers, it’s also applicable to Pokémon card tins. As such, trading card aficionado Nicole just wanted to show off how she was giving her Pokémon tins a second life on social media. Instead, […]