Someone in France just shipped a cozy, pocket-sized steampunk RPG in a box and I’m unreasonably pleased about it. Nobi Nobi Steampunk is one of two new adventure settings (the other being Cyberpunk, naturally) for the Nobi Nobi tabletop system: a fast, cinematic party game that gets you into a story in minutes. No 400-page rulebook. No character optimization spreadsheet. You strap on the clockwork goggles, load the electropistol, fire up the steamwagon, and go. The whole thing is modular too: mix and match with the Fantasy, Horror, and Thriller boxes because sure, why not, a steampunk horror thriller is basically Tuesday around here.

The Formula has always held that SteamPunk is a delivery mechanism for adventure, not a homework assignment. A tiny box that drops a table of people into gears-and-steam mayhem in under ten minutes? The Doctor approves. BackerKit late pledges are still open, rewards ship end of 2026. Get on it. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, so you might as well spend the time rolling dice.

A one-person dev named BrandonWritesGames has been grinding on Dieselpunk 1921 for nearly a year, logging hundreds of hours of collage-making, and he’s almost across the finish line. To prove it, a free condensed quickstart edition drops tomorrow (July 23) on itch.io, packing the full rules, a condensed character creation process, 34 country description pages, and an item list. Thirty-four countries. The Doctor is taking notes.

The pitch is political intrigue in the interwar period, which is basically the Dieselpunk sweet spot: grease-stained trench coats, Art Deco everything, factions that would sell you to the highest bidder before the ink dries, and the slow creep of Very Bad History just offstage. If you’ve ever wanted to run a game set in Monaco in 1921 where everyone is lying to everyone else, this is your game. The full release is inbound; the quickstart is the appetizer.

Go grab the free edition when it drops. Support the solo dev. Give the Doctor a full release to write about. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: BrandonWritesGames on itch.io

Someone finally did it. Someone looked at the grease-stained, rivet-popped glory of alt-history dieselpunk, strapped it to a mech, handed that mech a machine gun, and said: “yes, parkour.” Diesel Knights is a 6-v-6 mech/movement shooter set in a pulp-inspired dieselpunk world, and it funded on Kickstarter in forty-two minutes. FORTY-TWO. The Formula approves of this velocity.

The pitch is Titanfall’s fluid movement and mech combat DNA, dressed up in an aesthetic that looks like The Rocketeer crashed into Iron Harvest and they both liked it. No battle passes. No loot boxes. Just mastery, momentum, and the satisfying thud of a diesel-powered war machine doing something physically improbable at high speed. The Kickstarter closed at $526,576 from 7,763 backers, blew through every stretch goal, and the dev posted a fresh update on July 20, so the engine is still running. Wishlist it on Steam now, before the Ancient Gods wake up and ruin the servers.

Via: Steam / Kickstarter

The nominees for the 2026 ENNIE Awards have been announced, and voting is open RIGHT NOW. Go cast your ballot. Winners get announced at Gen Con in Indianapolis at the end of July, so the clock is ticking. This year’s field is legitimately stacked: Daggerheart, Legend in the Mist, Vaesen: City of My Nightmares (yes, please), and the Crooked Moon VTT are all in the mix, plus Call of Cthulhu products showing up in roughly half the categories because Chaosium apparently does not sleep. Good for them.

Also new this year: a dedicated Best Solo Game category, which means the TTRPG community has officially acknowledged that some of us roll dice alone in our laboratories at 2am. The Doctor neither confirms nor denies. The point is: if you play tabletop RPGs and you have opinions (you do), you have until Gen Con to make them count. The ENNIEs are a fan vote, which means the results are only as good as the people who bother to show up. Be the person who bothers to show up. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed vote comes close.

Houston, your weekend orders have arrived. Delta H Con 2026 is on the ground right now, July 17 through 19 at the Marriott Westchase, and it has a dedicated Steampunk Track that would make the Formulae proud. The centerpiece: a full Steampunk Ball headlined by Aurelio Voltaire and Addisyn Madd, framed as an Un-Birthday Party complete with tea dueling, parlor games, and door mouse prizes. Because of course. The con’s art theme this year is Neuroverse: Code Houston (cyberpunk plus anime plus gaming plus space fusion), which is basically the Formulae running a five-way merge and daring you to argue with the output.

Unwoman is also on the schedule for two evening sets inside the Steampunk Track, which means you get cello-driven industrial folk AND Voltaire doing his delightfully macabre thing in the same building across the same weekend. For a three-day pass that apparently goes for $45, that is a frankly irresponsible amount of value. The Doctor does not make financial recommendations, but the Doctor also is not NOT making a financial recommendation here.

If you are in Houston and you are not at this convention, I genuinely cannot help you. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal. Via: Delta H Con

Two guys. One enormous dieselpunk spider-turret. A 1920s Castillian monarchy held together with hydraulic grease and bad decisions. IRON NEST: Heavy Turret Simulator just became the number-one most wishlisted game of the June 2026 Steam Next Fest, and its demo is sitting at 99% Overwhelmingly Positive. That is not a rounding error. That is the universe telling you to pay attention. The Formula recognizes this game immediately: take a colossal interwar war machine, lock a lone operator inside it with teleprinters, ballistic calculators, hydraulic levers, and enough moral ambiguity to last a decade, and you have DieselPunk distilled into a first-person box of clanking, groaning, morally compromised steel.

Here is the thing nobody tells you: you will spend approximately zero percent of your time actually firing the cannon. You will spend the other hundred percent reading coordinates, charting ranges on a map the size of a kitchen table, calculating powder charges, manually rotating a turret that weighs more than a battleship, and then questioning whether High Command actually has any idea what they are pointing you at. (They do not. High Command never does.) It is part math test, part immersive sim, part ethics seminar nobody signed up for. The full release drops August 6, 2026. The free demo is still up right now. Go. The Doctor will not be held responsible for the hospital.

Via: Steam

The Clockpunk genre has a problem, and that problem is that most Clockpunk games look like someone put a gear decal on a generic fantasy RPG and called it a day. Duskfade, however, is not that. Indie studio Weird Beluga (yes, that is their actual name, and the Doctor approves) has built a full clockpunk world out of suspended architecture, intricate mechanisms, and painterly landscapes that shift from ethereal forests to underwater ruins to cloud-piercing heights. The whole land has been plunged into eternal night by a mysterious Clock Tower and its enigmatic Master Clockmakers, which is exactly the kind of villain backstory that makes sense when you think about it for two seconds and then makes you furious that you didn’t invent it first.

You play Zirian, a workshop apprentice accompanied by his mechanical bird sidekick Cuckoo, who must shatter the shackles of time (their words, and they earned them) to rescue his sister and restore the world. The traversal looks genuinely fluid: jumps, dashes, grapples, glides, swinging from floating chains, running suspended rails. GameSpot called it “the spiritual successor to Jak and Daxter that we’ve been waiting years for,” which is either massive hype or the truest thing anyone has said about a game in a decade. The demo is live right now on Steam and PS5, so you have zero excuse not to find out which one it is. Launches August 13 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Nintendo Switch 2.

Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a clockpunk kid with a mechanical bird and a vendetta against the concept of time might come close. High-5, Weird Beluga. Wishlist it. Play the demo. You’re welcome.

Via: Chalgyr’s Game Room

Flying pirate ship. Steampunk floating islands. Ancient Gods who want you very, very dead. Turn-based tactical combat where one bad move ends the whole run. Oh, and Lovecraftian atmosphere baked straight into the pixel art. The Doctor approves, and The Doctor does not approve of just anything. Dead Weight drops on Steam July 16 for the extremely reasonable sum of $12.99, and it has already racked up over 120,000 wishlists, which means you people have taste.

Here is what you are signing up for: captain a steam-powered airship across a procedurally generated world, recruit a crew of four distinct characters through branching skill trees, and then get absolutely worked over by compact tactical battlefields where every single hex counts. The dev cites Into the Breach and Final Fantasy Tactics as combat inspirations, which is a sentence that should make any self-respecting tactician sit up straighter. Throw in random events, fatigue, madness mechanics, and late-game crisis events that can blow the whole run sideways, and you have a roguelite that will eat your weekend like an Ancient God eats a poorly-positioned barbarian.

There is a free Prologue available on the Steam page right now, so you have zero excuses not to wishlist it and give it a spin before launch. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-placed broadside from a flying steampunk pirate ship comes close. High-5, Klukva Games.

Via: Steam (Dead Weight)

Iron Crown Enterprises just dropped HARP Steampunk, a new sourcebook by veteran designer Phil Masters (yes, the same Phil Masters who wrote GURPS Steampunk and GURPS Castle Falkenstein, so the man clearly has a type). It hit DriveThruRPG in PDF form simultaneously with a physical premiere at Gen Con, and it’s already the top-selling Phil Masters title on the platform. The Doctor approves of this velocity.

The book bolts the HARP system onto Victorian melodrama, weird science, and Jules Verne retro-sci-fi, delivering 12 new Steampunk professions: Detective, Doctor, Engineer, Pilot, and more. You also get mechanical rules for clockwork automata, steam-driven contraptions, ornithopters, steam-powered power armour, and something called Akashic Reading, which sounds exactly as gloriously unhinged as it should. Settings are modular, scaling from grounded Victorian realism all the way up to “electrical miracles,” so your table can calibrate from Sherlock Holmes to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen depending on how much absinthe the GM has had. Note that this is a sourcebook, not a standalone: you’ll need either the HARP Fantasy or HARP SF core rules to run it. PDF is $20.00. High-5, Iron Crown.

Via: DriveThruRPG / Iron Crown Enterprises

Samurai. Yōkai. And a British trade conglomerate rolling in with steam-powered war machines to “help” everyone modernize. Shadow of the Road is a turn-based tactical RPG from Another Angle Games (published by Owlcat, the fine people behind Pathfinder and Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader) set in a reimagined 1868 Bakumatsu-era Japan, where the Tokugawa Shogunate and Emperor Mutsuhito’s loyalists are already at each other’s throats, and the British East Nippon Company has decided this is a great time to show up with steampunk constructs and advanced firepower. Progress and prosperity, they promise. Sure. Sure they do.

Your fight roster isn’t just human factions either: yōkai share the battlefield with armored steampunk contraptions, so your party loadout has to cover supernatural threats AND industrial machinery in the same engagement. The campaign follows a Tokugawa spymaster who recruits ronin Satoru and Akira to escort a boy with unstable, catastrophic power, and every relationship in that party matters mechanically. Choices reshape bonds, break them, or push characters down completely different paths. The Doctor approves of consequences that actually stick. The demo is live on Steam right now, the full release is still 2026, and the store pages are already up on Steam, GOG, and Epic. Go play the demo. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-timed tactical yōkai ambush is a solid second place.

Via: RPG Site