inXile Entertainment (the same mad geniuses behind Wasteland and Torment) have been building Clockwork Revolution long enough that I started to wonder if Lady Ironwood had used the Chronometer to erase it from the timeline. Good news: it still exists. Bad news: it’s 2027 now, not 2026. The Xbox Games Showcase in June confirmed the slip, dropped a four-minute gameplay trailer, and then said absolutely nothing about a specific date. “Coming in due time.” Sure. Fine. I’ll be here, gears rusting.

The setup, though? Legitimately excellent. You’re loose in Avalon, a steam-powered Victorian metropolis run top-to-bottom by Lady Ironwood, a ruler who already got to the Chronometer first and quietly rewrote history to cement her grip on everything. Your job is to go back, make choices, and watch the butterfly effects ripple forward through the city. The comparisons to BioShock Infinite and Dishonored are warranted and the Doctor approves of both reference points. inXile has apparently written 750,000 words of dialogue for this thing. That’s not a game, that’s a civilization.

Xbox console exclusive, also on PC and Game Pass day one. Wishlist it now and let the waiting be someone else’s problem. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Warcradle Studios has been steadily rolling out factions for the new edition of Dystopian Wars, their alternate-late-19th-century naval wargame, and this month the Kaiser sends his regards: the Imperium hits the tabletop in October. Blood and iron, baby. We’re talking Blücher Cruisers as the Prussian workhorse, Augustus Bombardment Cruisers lobbing heavy mortars from long range, and Reiter Flak Cruisers watching the skies so your fleet doesn’t get chewed up by enemy aircraft. One starter box, multiple build options, maximum carnage on the Dystopian Age high seas.

If you somehow missed the new edition: Dystopian Wars is a miniatures wargame set in an alternate 19th century where super-science-fueled great powers clash over resources and dominion, on, above, and below the ocean. The new edition streamlined the rules without gutting the crunch (they trimmed the special-rule list from over 200 down to something a human being can actually memorize), and existing minis are still legal. Your old fleet doesn’t go in the bin. The Doctor approves of this policy; nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but at least your Imperium dreadnoughts get to die with dignity.

The Commonwealth Starter Set is already shipping this month, so if you want to get reps in before the Kaiser crashes the party, now is the time. High-5 to Warcradle for keeping the new-faction pipeline moving. Via: Warcradle Studios Blog

A new steampunk TTRPG just landed on Kickstarter, and The Doctor is paying attention. Brass & Embers, from Questborne Studios out of Orlando, runs on a D6 system and drops you into a world where the whole civilization is about to tear itself apart over a mineral called machnite. The industrialists want to burn it for profit, the faithful want to keep it sacred, and the Queen is sitting in the back doing her best “entertaining fad” impression while quietly expanding her empire on everyone else’s dime. Sound familiar? Good. That means the setting has teeth.

The system is designed to be easy to pick up and can run short campaigns or long-haul ones, which is the right call: nobody wants a steampunk RPG that requires a graduate seminar just to roll initiative. Pledges start at US$20 for a digital sourcebook, $55 for hardcover (early-bird tiers, standard is $10 more). They’re after $42,000 by September 16th and were sitting at about 10 percent of goal as of last week, so if this sounds like your kind of industrial-age theological throwdown, go give it a shove. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a fully funded Kickstarter is a decent start.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

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

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

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

The SteamPunk exhibition at the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.

It’s a very nice exhibition with an excellent explanation of what SteamPunk is.  If you’re new to SteamPunk, or have friends that are, this is an excellent video to start with.