[MS] – Pacific Rim Miniatures

We’ve gotten some questions on what types of models to use with MechaStellar so we thought it would be a good idea to put together some posts showing the types of figures we use. To start we’ll look at the miniatures we use for Pacific Rim.

For Pacific Rim we are using the models produced for the Heroclix game put out in 2013. Heroclix is a popular and long lived miniature game for various series most notably super heroes. The clix style models have also been used for various other franchises with the common item being a base that you can rotate and clicks into place. The base is a convenient way to show a units stat profile degrading as it takes damage. For this game they have all of the Jaegers present in the movie from left to right we have Gipsy Danger, Cherno Alpha, Crimson Typhoon, Striker Eureka and Coyote Tango. For the Kaiju they have Knife Head, Leatherback, Raiju, Slattern, and Scunner shown left to right below.

Conspicuously absent is Otachi one of the more iconic Kaiju from the movie. That said, Slattern the largest Kaiju in the movie is modeled with an incredibly small scale so you can easily use Slattern as a substitute for Otachi when you are running a Defend the City game or if you are running the Pacific Rim narrative mission pack found here.

When it comes to scale most of the Kaiju and jaegers are the right scale with the exception of Slattern. That said some models have a piece of terrain the Kaiju is standing on making them taller than others, we see this most prominently on Leatherback and to an extend Gipsy Danger. For comparison we have a 1/400 Gundam figure next to the Jaegers and the Kaiju.

While the Gundam is 18m tall (just shy of 60ft) most of the Jaegers and Kaiju are around the 200ft size, so if these were perfectly to scale they’d be about 3x larger than a Gundam while currently most are about 1.5x its size. Not perfect but the heights are close enough that they blend in well on the tabletop if you decide to do a Super Robot Wars style game and start smashing universes together.

While this set is from 2013 the price on secondary markets isn’t too bad (at least at the time of writing). If you prefer to run MechaStellar with larger models then the NECA line of Pacific Rim figures are a good choice, many of them can be found on eBay for $20-30 with some auctions being won for $10-20. It also includes several other Jaegers not featured in the movie.

2022 Update:

Recently a new game called Pacific Rim: Extinction was released and the models have begun showing up in your friendly local gaming stores. The models look great, are finely detailed compared to the Heroclix models and most importantly they are the perfect size for a tabletop game. They tower above a 1/400 scale Gundam model and they’re roughly the same size as the Seika Evangelion models we recommend here. The only downside is that these are quite a bit more expensive coming in around $35 per model. Below are some comparison shots.

Lastly, if you are a Lego expert there are a number of designs out there for making Jaegers out of Legos. Here’s a good resource: https://rebrickable.com/users/SassySeal/mocs/

Here are some other posts for game minis: Gundam, Evangelion, Getter Robo