Steampunk games put you inside the style rather than in front of it. In a video game you can walk the streets of an imagined Victorian city, ride its airships and take apart its machines. In a strategy game you can build a city around a great coal-fired generator and keep it alive through an endless winter. Round a table, you can build canals and railways across Lancashire, or invent a steam engineer of your own and play out an adventure with friends. There are steampunk games for every taste, from gentle puzzles to grim survival.
This guide explains what makes a game steampunk, then covers video games set in steampunk worlds, strategy and building games, board and card games, and role-playing games, before looking at games for children and at how to find more. Each game is named with its year and the company that made it. For video games we give the age rating that PEGI's own website showed on 12 November 2026. We say nothing about prices or where to buy, and we review nothing.
What makes a game steampunk
The world, the machines and the making
A game is steampunk when its world is built on the age of steam and its impossible machines. The setting looks Victorian or Edwardian, or like an invented world of the same period. The technology runs on steam, clockwork or some strange fuel the game invents. And very often the game lets you make things: craft gadgets, build a city, repair an automaton or design a machine. That last part fits the style well, because steampunk has always been about the pleasure of seeing how things work.
Victorian is not always steampunk
Some games are set in the real nineteenth century without impossible machines, such as games about railways or the Industrial Revolution. Others are set in the 1920s or 1930s with diesel engines and giant walking machines, which is the related style called dieselpunk. Both are included here where steampunks enjoy them, and we say which is which.
PEGI ratings
PEGI, short for Pan European Game Information, puts an age label on video games. Its own site explains the five labels. PEGI 3 games are suitable for all age groups. PEGI 7 games may have scenes or sounds that could frighten younger children, with only very mild violence. PEGI 12 allows slightly more graphic violence towards fantasy characters and mild bad language. PEGI 16 applies once violence looks as it would in real life. PEGI 18 is the adult rating. A game can carry different labels on different machines or in different editions, so check PEGI's site for the version you mean. Board games and role-playing books do not carry PEGI labels; the age printed on the box is the publisher's own advice.
Video games set in steampunk worlds
Magic and machinery
Final Fantasy VI (1994), made by Square for the Super Nintendo, moved the famous series away from a medieval world into one whose technology resembles the Second Industrial Revolution, where machinery and magic exist side by side. Its Empire builds Magitek, which combines magic with machinery, including armoured machines ridden by its soldiers. Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura (2001), made by Troika Games and published by Sierra On-Line for Windows computers, is set in a fantasy world in the middle of its own Industrial Revolution, where magic competes with technology, and it begins with the survivor of a zeppelin crash.
Automatons and clockwork trains
Syberia (2002), made and published by the French company Microïds and created by the Belgian artist Benoît Sokal, is a gentle adventure game of exploring and solving puzzles. Kate Walker, an American lawyer, is sent to a French village to oversee the sale of a factory that makes clockwork automaton toys, and finds herself travelling east across Europe and Russia on a clockwork train, with an automaton driver called Oscar, in search of the owner's lost brother. PEGI rates the original Syberia 7, and Syberia 2 is also 7, while Syberia 3 carries 12 and Syberia: The World Before 16.
Industrial cities and floating ones
Dishonored (2012), made by Arkane Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks, is set in Dunwall, an industrial city stricken by plague, where Corvo Attano, the Empress's bodyguard, is framed for her murder. Dishonored 2 (2016), by Arkane Lyon, continues the story. BioShock Infinite (2013), made by Irrational Games and published by 2K, is set in 1912 in Columbia, a city floating in the air. The Order: 1886 (2015), made by Ready at Dawn and published by Sony for the PlayStation 4, is set in an alternate steampunk London. All of these are violent action games: PEGI rates Dishonored, Dishonored 2 and BioShock Infinite 18.
London above and below
Assassin's Creed Syndicate (2015), made by Ubisoft Quebec, is set in Victorian London in 1868 and follows the twins Jacob and Evie Frye, who meet figures such as Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Alexander Graham Bell. It is a historical game rather than a steampunk one, and PEGI rates it 18. Our guide to Victorian London describes the real city. Sunless Sea (2015), by the studio Failbetter Games, takes place in the world of its browser game Fallen London, in which Victorian London has been moved beneath the earth to the shore of a vast underground sea.
Puppets
Lies of P (2023), made by Neowiz and Round8 Studio (now called Nough), is loosely based on Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio (1883). It is set in Krat, a city inspired by the Belle Époque, where automaton-like puppets do the city's work, and you play Pinocchio himself. PEGI rates it 16, and its label shows pictures for violence and for horror.
Strategy and building games
Frostpunk
Frostpunk (2018), made and published by the Polish studio 11 bit studios, is a city-building survival game set in an alternate late nineteenth century. The world has frozen, and in most of its scenarios you lead a city built round a massive coal-fired generator that heats everything within its reach. You gather coal, wood, steel and food to keep people warm and healthy, and make hard choices about how to survive. If the coal runs out, the generator stops. It is one of the best known steampunk games of recent years. Besides its main story, told in three acts in which the city faces trouble from within as well as from the cold, it has several other scenarios, each with its own challenges. Frostpunk 2 (2024), set thirty years later, puts you in charge of a city after a catastrophic volcanic winter. PEGI rates both 16.
Colonies, industry and flying cities
They Are Billions, made and published by Numantian Games, is a real-time strategy survival game set in a steampunk world after a disaster, in which you build and defend colonies. Its campaign was released in 2019, and PEGI rates it 16. Anno 1800 (2019), made by Ubisoft Blue Byte, is a city-building game set during the Industrial Revolution, with battles at sea, tourism, and the effects of industry on the people who live on your islands. It is historical rather than steampunk, but its brick, smoke and steam are close to the look. PEGI rates it 12. Airborne Kingdom (2020), by The Wandering Band, asks you to build and run a flying city that can move from place to place.
Why these games suit the style
Building games suit steampunk because they show the whole machine of a city: where the coal comes from, how the heat reaches the houses, who works the furnaces. They make the industrial age something you run rather than something you look at, and they often raise the same questions as the best steampunk stories, about progress, cost and who pays it.
Board games and card games
Railways and the Industrial Revolution
Brass (2007), designed by Martin Wallace and published by his own company, Warfrog Games, is set in Lancashire during the Industrial Revolution. Players build coal mines, cotton mills, ports, canals and railways, and the game is played in two periods, the canal age and the railway age. In 2018 the Canadian publisher Roxley released a new edition, Brass: Lancashire, and a successor, Brass: Birmingham, which adds new ways to play to the same core rules. Ticket to Ride (2004), designed by Alan R. Moon and published by Days of Wonder, is a family game of claiming railway routes across a map, and it has become the best-selling train game in the world. Neither has impossible machines, but both are about the age of steam.
Trains, mechs and Holmes
Colt Express (2014), designed by Christophe Raimbault and published by Ludonaute, is a railway-themed family game. It won the Spiel des Jahres in 2015, the German Game of the Year award, created in 1978 to reward family-friendly games. Scythe (2016), designed by Jamey Stegmaier and published by Stonemaier Games, is set in an alternative 1920s Europe where factions build their economies and fight with giant mechs, which makes it dieselpunk rather than steampunk. Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective, first published in 1981, is a tabletop game crossed with a gamebook, in which players try to solve cases in Victorian London as Holmes would.
Cards
Magic: The Gathering, the collectible card game created by Richard Garfield and released by Wizards of the Coast in 1993, has visited steampunk too. Its Kaladesh sets, first released on 30 September 2016, are set in a world with a steampunk look in which steam is replaced by a magical substance called aether, and the story centres on an Inventors' Fair in the city of Ghirapur, with inventors, machines and vehicles throughout. The Kaladesh booster won the Origins Award for the fan favourite collectible game of 2016.
Make your own
Many families give a familiar game a steampunk dress: brass-painted counters, a home-made board in the style of an old map, cards with Victorian lettering. It costs almost nothing, and it is a good first making project. Old buttons, washers and bottle tops painted in brass and copper make good counters, and a sheet of brown paper, crumpled and flattened again, makes a board that looks a hundred years old.
Role-playing games
A tabletop role-playing game is a game of shared storytelling. Each player invents a character and describes what that character does, one player acts as the referee and describes the world, and rules, usually with dice, decide what happens when the outcome is uncertain. Steampunk suits it beautifully, because inventing a character is so close to dressing as one. Our guide to steampunk names and characters helps with both.
Space: 1889
Space: 1889, created by Frank Chadwick and first published by Game Designers' Workshop in 1989, was the first role-playing game to take steam technology into space in the style of Verne, Wells and Arthur Conan Doyle. In its history, Thomas Edison invents an ether propeller and travels to Mars in 1870, and by 1889 the great powers have colonies on Mars and Venus. Ships float on liftwood, a rare plant that defies gravity. Mars is an ancient desert planet of warring city-states and failing canals, Venus a swamp of great reptiles, and because wireless has not yet been invented, messages between Earth and Mars are flashed by heliograph stations in orbit. New editions have followed, the most recent crowdfunded in 2023.
Castle Falkenstein
Castle Falkenstein, designed by Mike Pondsmith and published by R. Talsorian Games in 1994, is named after a legendary castle in the Bavarian Alps that was never built, and its adventures are in the spirit of Victorian novels of intrigue such as The Prisoner of Zenda. It is set around 1870 in New Europa, an alternate Europe that also has dragons and faeries. Players can be anything from an anarchist to a mad scientist or a steam engineer. It uses ordinary playing cards instead of dice, and each player keeps a diary of their character's adventures.
Deadlands
Deadlands, written by Shane Lacy Hensley and published by Pinnacle Entertainment Group in 1996, mixes the western with horror and steampunk. Its year is 1876, and its technology is driven by ghost rock, an invented mineral that burns hotter and longer than coal, which gives its mad scientists their strange devices. It has won the Origins Award, an American prize for games, eight times, and has been rewritten for several other sets of rules, among them Savage Worlds.
Victoriana, Iron Kingdoms and Eberron
Victoriana, designed by John Tuckey, Scott Rhymer and Richard Nunn and first released in 2003 by the small British publisher Heresy Games, is set in a fantasy steampunk 1867; Cubicle 7 published later editions in 2009 and 2013. Iron Kingdoms, first published by Privateer Press as a role-playing game on 1 July 2004, mixes high fantasy and steampunk in what its publisher calls Full Metal Fantasy, with steam-powered machines called steamjacks. Eberron, created by Keith Baker for Dungeons & Dragons and published in 2004 after it was chosen from more than 11,000 entries in a competition run by Wizards of the Coast, has magic-powered trains, airships and the warforged, living constructs made of stone, wood and metal.
Airship Pirates
Airship Pirates, published in 2011 by Cubicle 7 for Cakebread & Walton, is based on the world of the songs of the American steampunk band Abney Park, and puts the players in command of their own steam-powered airships as air pirates. Our guide to steampunk music and bands says more about the band.
Games for children
Video games rated PEGI 7
Several steampunk video games carry a PEGI 7 label, which PEGI uses for games with scenes or sounds that may frighten younger children and only very mild violence. SteamWorld Dig (2013), by the Swedish studio Image & Form, has you play Rusty, a steam-powered robot who digs through the mine under a small western steampunk town called Tumbleton. SteamWorld Heist (2015), from the same studio, is a tactics game in which Captain Piper Faraday, a smuggler, gathers a crew of robots and boards enemy spaceships. Machinarium (2009), a puzzle game by the Czech studio Amanita Design, follows a small robot called Josef, named after Josef Čapek, whose brother Karel brought the word robot into the world, through a city of machines, where he foils a gang's plot to blow up the city's tower and rescues his friend Berta. Professor Layton and the Curious Village, made by Level-5 for the Nintendo DS and released in Europe in 2008, is a puzzle adventure in which Professor Hershel Layton and his young assistant Luke explore a village whose people love brain-teasers. It has 120 puzzles in the main game, from sliding puzzles to logic problems, and solving them earns machine parts that build a small robot dog. PEGI rates all four 7, and some versions also show PEGI's small picture for fear or for violence.
Minecraft and Dress to Impress
Steampunk airships, clock towers and workshops can be built in Minecraft too, and our guide to building steampunk in Minecraft shows how. The steampunk theme in the Roblox game Dress to Impress has its own guide too: see the steampunk theme in Dress to Impress.
Round the table
Ticket to Ride and Colt Express are both family games, and either makes a good start for children who like trains. Check the age printed on the box, which is the publisher's own guide. A home-made steampunk version of a game the family already knows is often the most fun of all. Whatever the game, PEGI's site also explains the parental controls on consoles and computers, which can limit online chat and the time children spend playing.
Finding games in the style
Words to look for
Games are not always labelled steampunk. Look also for Victorian, alternate history, clockwork, airship, gaslight, industrial fantasy and dieselpunk in a game's description. Screenshots tell you quickly whether the look is there: brass, rivets, smoke, top hats and goggles.
Check the rating and the content
Before buying a video game for a child, look it up on PEGI's own site, which shows the age label for each version and small pictures for what it contains, such as violence, fear or bad language. A steampunk look can hide a very dark game, as several in this guide show.
A first role-playing session
A role-playing game needs only the rulebook, some dice or cards, paper and pencils, and a few friends. Keep the first adventure short: one evening, one place and one clear problem, such as a stolen invention or a runaway airship. Let each player describe their character's clothes and gadgets before play starts, because in steampunk the costume is half the fun. Many players go on to dress as their characters, and a character sheet makes a good starting point for a real outfit.
Playing with other people
Board games and role-playing games are best with company. Clubs that meet to play them, and cafés where you can play games from the shelves, are found in many towns, and they are a good way to try a game before owning it. Steampunk gatherings are another place to meet people who enjoy the same things: see our guide to steampunk events in the UK.
From games to films and back
Many steampunk games share their world with films, books and series, and one leads naturally to another. Our guides to the best steampunk films and animated steampunk films and series are a good next step, and the Professor Layton games even have a film of their own.
