What is the game that Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will play in "Stranger Things"?

The game that Mike, Dustin, Lucas, and Will play in “Stranger Things” is Dungeons & Dragons.

The tabletop role-playing game appears immediately in the series, when the four friends gather in Mike Wheeler’s basement in Hawkins, Indiana. Their fantasy campaign features characters, dice, monsters, and a Dungeon Master who guides the story. The opening game is interrupted before Will can finish his turn, shortly before his disappearance in November 1983.

Dungeons & Dragons is more than a hobby in the show: it gives the friends a shared vocabulary for understanding the supernatural threats they encounter. They compare creatures from the Upside Down to familiar D&D monsters, including the Demogorgon and later Vecna. These comparisons are storytelling analogies, not claims that the fictional creatures are literally identical to their game counterparts.

A common mix-up is confusing the boys’ original home campaign with the Hellfire Club, the older-student D&D group introduced in Season 4. Mike and Dustin join that campaign, while Lucas initially misses it because of his basketball game. The real-world game was first published in 1974 by TSR.