Twenty editions. Twenty. The Romans would approve of the numerals, and so does the Doctor. Whitby Steampunk Weekend XX descends on Whitby, North Yorkshire, July 24-26, 2026, turning the seaside town Bram Stoker used as his personal horror-writing backdrop into something Stoker himself would have found delightfully unhinged: thousands of costumed steampunks doing costumed promenades along the clifftops, a 70-plus-stall Retail Emporium packed with handcrafted curiosities, live music, workshops, and educational presentations, all inside the Whitby Pavilion. Free daytime entry. Family friendly. The past is always in the future, apparently, and in Whitby it is also apparently wearing a very elaborate hat.

Seriously though: free, accessible, and set in a town with a ruined abbey looming over the harbor and a Dracula connection baked into the postcode? That is either the best-scouted convention venue in the genre or the most [expletive deleted] obvious one, and either way the Doctor gives full credit. If you are anywhere near North Yorkshire in late July and you are not already packing your goggles and your best brass-fitted waistcoat, I genuinely do not know what you are doing with your life. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but Whitby Steampunk Weekend at least gives you something worth staying alive for.

Via: Whitby Pavilion

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

Somewhere in an alternate 1940s, Abraham Lincoln survives, the Reconstruction goes differently, and battleships take to the skies on the back of bold leaps in electricity, magnetism, and gravity. That is the premise baked into every rivet of Steel Seas & Sky Machines, the Portsmouth, Virginia exhibition showcasing the dieselpunk world of artist Tony Snipes and his fictional Portsmouth Aeroshipbuilding Co. Detailed sketches, 3-D models, and digital works, all locked in to an alt-history where the home front didn’t build Liberty Ships, it built Aerocycles and aeroships. The Doctor approves of this timeline.

If you missed the exhibition, Snipes has a live Kickstarter running right now for the Aerocycle Art Book & Model Kit, a product launch straight out of The Yard itself. An art book AND a model kit. In a dieselpunk universe. For actual money you can spend. This is the Omega7Red Formulae applied to “what if WWII-era industrial propaganda was awesome on purpose” and the result is exactly what you’d hope. Go back this thing. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a tabletop Aerocycle might come close.

Via: The Steampunk Explorer

A boy. A family of inventors. An enormous steampunk airship packed wall-to-wall with robots that have, predictably, gone full murder-mode. They Will Come is a steampunk adventure/puzzle game from Game Pop Studio, and the premise is exactly as good as it sounds: you play as Benjamin, a kid who has to sneak through his own home while armies of machines try to end him. The aesthetic is pure Punk gold — clockwork automatons, airship corridors, brass-and-steam everything — and the gameplay has you solving environmental puzzles with small helper bots called Embots, plus the occasional nuclear option of unleashing your own heavy robot, Talus, when subtlety is no longer on the menu.

This is, functionally, what the Omega7Red Formulae produces when you feed it “Home Alone” and a Jules Verne novel at the same time. The Doctor approves. It hits PC (Steam) this month, July 2026, so there is no excuse not to wishlist it immediately and report back.

Via: WorthPlaying

Mark Twain’s hometown gets taken over by goggle-wearing Victorians every Labor Day weekend, and honestly, that is the most correct thing that happens in Missouri all year. The Big River Steampunk Festival returns to historic downtown Hannibal, September 4-7, 2026, and it is, by most credible estimates, the largest outdoor steampunk festival in the United States. Over 20,000 attendees descend on Main Street for costume contests, Nerf and Tea Dueling, vaudeville shows, workshops, live music, vendors, and a Pet and Human Costume Parade on Monday morning. (Yes. Your corgi can be SteamPunk. The Formula works on dogs. I have tested this.)

This year’s event almost didn’t happen, by the way. The Hannibal City Council nearly tabled the whole thing over one councilwoman’s concern about Friday delivery trucks being blocked. ONE business showed up to complain. ONE. The rest of downtown presumably looked at 20,000+ steampunks and thought, “yeah, we’ll move our freight.” The council came to its senses and approved it. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal.

Hannibal is, as the locals will tell you, “authentically Victorian” and a genuine center of Industrial Revolution commerce: steamboats, steam trains, the whole brass-and-iron tableau. Think Renaissance Faire, except instead of medieval England it’s Victorian America, and instead of turkey legs you’re getting high tea and a duel. Admission to the main festival is free. Some ticketed events cost extra. Your excuses not to go are officially invalid. bigriversteampunkfestival.com

You’re a gambler. The kingdom’s punishment for gambling is getting thrown into a giant industrial prison called the King’s Well, a massive mechanical pit of rusted gears, shadowy tunnels, and relentless contraptions that want you dead. The only way out is up, and the only weapons you have are a deck of cards and whatever cunning the Formula left you with. Turkish indie studio Fire Brick Games has built a dark steampunk roguelite poker deckbuilder that fuses Balatro-style card mechanics with grim, clanking Victorian-industrial atmosphere, and the demo is on Steam right now. Q3 2026 for the full release.

The core gimmick is genuinely clever: you feed cards into rusted machines to trigger attacks, defenses, and special effects, or you hold them and cash in a poker hand for bigger bonuses. Every run is a different build, every machine has different slot requirements, and the four starting gamblers (including the Iron Veteran and the High Roller, because of course) each play differently. It’s Slay the Spire meets a steam-powered loan shark, and The Doctor approves of every single gear-grinding, card-flipping second of it. High-5, Fire Brick.

Go wishlist it. Go play the demo. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-timed Full House against a rusted kill-machine comes close. Via: King’s Well on Steam

Chaosium, the house that gave us Call of Cthulhu and a respectable body count of player characters, just announced a brand-new tabletop RPG: Time Without Tide. The setting is a fog-choked, post-apocalyptic faux-Victorian world overrun with robots, magic, and (presumably) orphans with serious anger management issues. You play a Delver: someone whose job description is basically “go outside into the horrifying Fog and find out what’s in it.” Spoiler: it’s probably not a tea party.

And here’s the part that has The Doctor’s attention: they’re not using BRP. This is a whole new engine, purpose-built for tactical combat and what the BackerKit page calls “highly customisable character development” (vehicles, gear, companions, mutant powers). So Chaosium built a steampunk game from scratch instead of just bolting Victorian hats onto their existing system. That is either brilliantly committed or magnificently ambitious. Possibly both. The Formula approves of both.

It’s not live yet; the BackerKit campaign is coming. Watch the pre-launch page, get on the list, and tell them The Doctor sent you. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-timed crowdfunding notification is a solid third place.

Via: Bell of Lost Souls

Somewhere between 2008 and the heat death of the universe, Hungarian director Balazs Hatvani has been building Thelomeris: a city of cogwheels and clocks where the citizens exist solely to feed the insatiable Clock Factory, and no one knows who built it or why. That is, objectively, the most on-brand premise I have encountered since I invented the Omega7Red Formulae. ClockPunk. DieselPunk. Noir. A city that is itself a machine that makes more machine. The Doctor approves so hard he pulled something.

And they got Mark Hamill to play the mysterious Stranger and serve as a script consultant. Luke Skywalker. The Joker. That Mark Hamill, in a brooding Eastern European clockwork dystopia. The Formula was applied by a Hungarian filmmaker with impeccable taste, and the result is either going to be extraordinary or the most beautiful catastrophe ever committed to green screen. Either way I win, because both outcomes are things I want to see. The film has been in development since 2008, which means it has been cooking longer than some of my laboratory assistants have been alive. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but apparently this movie is going to try.

A trailer exists. Hamill is credited. The city is dark, cold, and run entirely on clock-powered despair. Someone please get this thing released before the gears stop turning. Via: Screen Anarchy

The Chicago Steampunk Exposition is back, and this year they pulled off something that earns them a genuine high-5 from the Doctor: they got Gail Carriger on the guest roster. If that name doesn’t ring your brass bells, fix that immediately. Carriger is the archaeologist-turned-novelist behind the Parasol Protectorate series, the Finishing School books, and roughly a dozen other reasons to cancel your weekend plans. Victorian werewolves, dirigibles, parasols as weapons, tea as a survival mechanism. The Omega7Red Formulae practically wrote those books itself.

The Expo is doing its usual trick of cracking open interdimensional time portals back to the 1893 World’s Fair, because apparently just having a steampunk convention isn’t dramatic enough and they deserve full credit for committing to the bit. If you are anywhere near the Chicago metro and not already planning attendance, I cannot help you. Some people are beyond the reach of the Formulae. The rest of you: find your best waistcoat, oil your goggles, and go meet the woman who made Victorian etiquette into a contact sport.

Via: Chicago Steampunk Exposition

Catalyst Game Labs just dropped the Frostpunk RPG: Core Rulebook into retail this week, and yes, the Formulae approves. The video game already nailed the SteamPunk-survival-city-building sweet spot (coal-fired generators, the last city on Earth, morally crushing choices before your morning tea), and now 11 bit Studios and Catalyst have handed you the keys to run that frozen nightmare yourself at a tabletop. Players manage the last city on Earth as resources run out, navigate Hope and Discontent city mechanics, and apparently make each other miserable with the Dice Core engine. $49.99 MSRP. That is a bargain for the number of friendships you will destroy.

The Doctor has been watching Frostpunk eat city-builders alive since the original launched, and the sequel has only gotten meaner, so a full tabletop adaptation was, frankly, overdue. If your game group survived Pandemic with their relationships intact, consider this the next stress test. Just remember: the law must be passed. It’s always the law.

Good job, high‑5, Catalyst. Nothing can beat old age and betrayal, but a well-timed coal shortage comes close. Via: ICv2