Chrono CCG is a free-to-play digital card game where rival time-traveling syndicates beat each other senseless across unraveling timelines, fighting to rewrite history itself. Your agents Immortalize mid-match, ascending to ultimate forms from across time. The timeline itself shifts on the battlefield as a core mechanic. It is, in short, exactly as unhinged as it sounds, and The Doctor approves.

Built by veterans of Legends of Runeterra and other digital CCGs, it hit Steam Early Access on June 23rd and has been quietly patching ever since. The Steam tags read like someone ran the Omega7Red Formulae on a deck of playing cards: Steampunk, CyberPunk, Alternate History, Time Manipulation, Post-Apocalyptic. That’s not a card game, that’s a whole Punk-iverse in a box. Current Steam reviews sit at 71% positive overall, trending up to 84% in the last 30 days as the patches land. Still rough around the edges (matchmaking needs work, the new-player onboarding was a mess at launch), but the bones are genuinely interesting. I’m giving it a cautious ΩΩΩ for now, with full expectation of upgrading that rating at full release if they stick the landing.

It’s free. You have no excuse not to at least shuffle a deck. Via: Steam

The street finds its own uses for things, and apparently the street also finds its own uses for rules systems. Shadowrun Anarchy 2.0 just went fully funded on Kickstarter, courtesy of Catalyst Game Labs and Black Book Editions, and if you’ve never played Shadowrun before: imagine the year 2070, magic came back, corporations own everything, elves and trolls are filing W-2s, and you are a street-level criminal with a datajack and a dragon problem. The original Anarchy was a rules-light take on that universe, and 2.0 is the cleaned-up, expanded follow-up. The Omega7Red Formulae recognizes this as CyberPunk operating at full power.

Shadowrun has always been the genre that SteamPunk kids grow up into when they realize the future is a lot grittier than a brass airship. Neon replaces copper pipe, megacorps replace robber barons, and the hacking is way more annoying to run at the table. Anarchy fixes that last part: it strips out the notoriously baroque ruleset and hands you something you can actually finish a campaign with without needing a spreadsheet for your spreadsheet. Catalyst knows what they’re doing here. High-5 to everyone who backed it.

Via: TTRPG Fanatics

Your wallet is about to get jacked in and left bleeding in a neon-soaked alley, and you are going to thank them for it. Steam Cyberpunk Fest 2026 runs August 3 through 10, and it is exactly what the label says: a week of discounts on high-tech, low-life games featuring neon megacities, corporate dystopias, chrome implants, and the general understanding that the future is a bad neighborhood you choose to live in anyway. Cyberpunk 2077, Ghostrunner, Deus Ex, and a few hundred of their degenerate friends are all expected to be on the block.

Look, the Doctor has a complicated relationship with CyberPunk. It is the rebellious younger cousin of SteamPunk, the one who swapped the top hat for a neural interface and traded brass gears for black-market wetware. Different aesthetic, same energy: the Omega7Red Formulae recognizes it as kin. If you have been sitting on a wishlist full of neon-drenched future-noir titles, this is your week. Load up the list, clear some hard drive space, and try not to spend your rent money. (No promises on that last part.) The Train Fest just pulled out of the station, so the timing is perfect: go directly from locomotives to cyberneticly-enhanced assassins with no stops in between.

High-5, your future dystopia awaits. Via: GameGrin

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

The Formula works on hardware. We have proof. ACEMAGIC took one look at the original 1985 Nintendo Entertainment System, nodded slowly, and stuffed an AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 inside the shell: 12 cores, 24 threads, 5.1GHz boost, integrated Radeon 890M graphics, 32GB of DDR5, a 1TB NVMe SSD, Wi-Fi 7, and a USB4 port. The Retro X5 looks like a prop from your childhood game shelf. It plays Cyberpunk 2077 at 60fps. That is, objectively, the funniest sentence I have written this year.

The design pulls the NES colorway without crossing into licensed territory: grey plastic, a bright red power button, functional mechanical grille vents, and zero RGB lighting screaming “GAMER” at you from across the room. It ships with RetroPlay Box, a built-in launcher that sets up your emulators without the usual three-hour Friday-night yak-shaving session. The tool-free snap-fit lid means you can crack it open and swap RAM like a cartridge. I respect this deeply and I will not apologize.

Is it a $1,049 conversation piece that Nintendo’s lawyers are almost certainly side-eyeing? Yes. Do I care? The Doctor does not care. The Omega7Red Formulae has been validating exactly this kind of decision since before the Pi-Day incident. Slap modern silicon into a retro shell, ship it with a red power button, and call it transformation. That is literally the job. Good job, high-5.

Via: HotHardware

Gentlefolk of the Punk-iverse, a moment of your time. You know the goggles. The goggles. The ones glued to every top hat at every convention since 2003, doing precisely nothing except looking magnificent. The Doctor has always defended them on aesthetic grounds alone. Well. ASUS ROG and XREAL have gone and run those goggles through some kind of Formula of their own, because the ROG XREAL R1 is a 91-gram pair of AR glasses that projects a 171-inch virtual Micro-OLED screen directly into your eyeballs at 240Hz with a 0.01ms response time. They have electrochromic lenses that auto-tint when you look at the screen and go clear when you look away. They weigh less than a decent pocket watch. They have Bose spatial audio built in. The future has finally caught up to the cosplay.

Is $849 a lot for goggles? Yes. Is it less than the steam-powered difference engine you were going to build in your garage? Also yes. The Doctor is putting this through the Omega7Red Formulae right now: feed in “gaming AR glasses,” crank the Formula, and what emerges is a CyberPunk street samurai overlaid on a SteamPunk airship navigator, both of them seeing things the rest of the crowd simply cannot. That’s not a product description, that’s a destiny. Expect them to ship July 2026, so you have exactly enough time to add a few gears and call it a con build. Good job, high-5.

Via: ASUS ROG Press Room