Category: Gundam Tabletop

MechaStellar VER11 Roadmap

MechaStellar VER10 had a long run and it was a significant departure from VER 5-9 which had the paradigm of you attack with a flat number of shots and your opponent rolls dice to evade.  Instead VER10 set a new paradigm with both the attacker and defender rolling dice to HIT and DEF.  This solved our #1 FAQ of “Why can’t I roll dice to attack?”.  VER11 will continue with that paradigm, reusing a lot of the same rules and thought processes from VER10 while cutting down on the number of things you need to remember on a mech profile and trimming down mental math.  VER11 will have the following major changes.

We will also cover these in depth in their own separate posts.

Removal of Bonus Hits & DEF

MechaStellar VER10 would have you roll your attack dice then apply a modifier, for example 6d10 + 3 HITs, so if you rolled 4 Hits your total would be 7 Hits.  Likewise for Defense.  VER11 is removing these modifiers and it will simply be dice pool vs dice pool, i.e. 6d10 vs 5d10; and whoever rolls best wins.

This had the advantage of being much faster with less mental math.  It also becomes more exciting because the variance on attacks or defense is much, much higher.  Sometimes you’ll have 6-10 hits, othertimes you might have one or none.  Likewise, this is also the biggest disadvantage.

That said, MechaStellar VER11 is significantly less lethal than previous versions.  And Pilot Skills will let you either mitigate that variance or multiply it, leading to some dramatic moments on the tabletop.

Mech Performance has also been flattened from 1-10 to 1-3 to represent three different eras. It’s now significantly easier to field your favorite units like the 08th MS Team even against superior models from Char’s Counterattack and still hold your own or reenact you favorite scenes like Unicorn’s Torrington base or Kondoh’s Revival of Zeon.

Rest assured, that unit roles like Sniper, Battler, etc. which provided bonus Hits or Defense before will still improve your unit.  Likewise, elite pilot bonuses like Barrage / Bullseye etc. have been folded into the Weapon trigger system, as well as passive pilot bonuses.

Weapon Triggers

The biggest change to VER11 is the inclusion of Weapon Triggers and the removal of Rapid Fire.  While working on small size units you would see in Dunbine, Votoms, or Code Geass, our previous paradigm of low damage but massive +HIT bonuses was not working out.  We were looking for alternate ways to make machine gun types weapons effective, without the tidal wave of hits they were causing.

This eventually led to the development of the “Barrage Trait” for machine gun type weapons that gave you a lot of extra dakka on your rolls while preventing weapons from going over the 10d10 attack dice cap.  Barrage was instantly a huge hit at the playtester tables, and eventually spawned the question of “should other weapons have Trait’s too?”

To do so, Rapid Fire, one of the last legacy items from our 40k roots was eliminated and replaced with Battle Field roles like Barrage Bullseye, Siege, AOE, etc.  Which were all big successes.  Eventually we decided that “Rolling a 10 = CRIT” should be removed and instead replaced with the weapon trait.  For example Barrage 10+, Siege 10+, Bullseye 10+.  Then for the sake of weapon balance the “crit numbers” now called “Trigger numbers” would change to be Barrage 8+ or Bullseye 9+ etc.

Weapon Triggers were the longest development items in the 4 months of VER11 dev time (April through July).  There will be multiple Design Goals posts featuring weapon triggers, how we prototyped them, the mechanical dead ends and the final products.  Since that will likely be a weeks worth of posts, those will come at the of the VER11 Design Goals series.

Here are some sample Triggers. Additionally, the number of saves you roll is no longer equal to the number of unblocked hits.  Instead it’s based on the number of Triggers rolled, making the game significantly less lethal when you cannot avoid a hit.

  • Critical weapons still Crit (2 Hits instead of 1).
  • Barrage weapons roll lots of dakka dice without needing to be in Rapid Fire range.
  • Bullseye weapons can target any unit and gain Crits vs targets without cover.
    • Elites no longer ignore the targeting rules
  • Siege weapons blow up cover and generate 2 Saves per Trigger.
    • See more on Saves below
  • Pierce weapons improve their Save i.e. Armor Penetration for each Trigger.
  • Counter weapons are the only weapon that can counterattack by default.
  • There are also Combination Triggers that combine 2 of the above Triggers.

Saves

Armor Saves are no longer the only Save in the game.   Now each weapon has a Save assigned to it, and all weapons can force a Save every time you roll a Trigger.  Since Saves are now tied to Triggers instead of Unblocked Hits, only lucky rolls are lethal.

  • Armor Penetration (AP) = Standard Pass the Save or take 1000 DMG
  • Stun Save (ST) = They remove actions or deal 500 DMG
  • Push / Pull (PP) = These Move the target or deal 500 DMG.
  • Break Saves (BR) = This weakens the targets Shield / Armor or deals 500 DMG.
  • Mobility Saves (MB) = The target loses a Move action or takes 500 DMG.

Morale

Momentum have been renamed to Morale Points.  You now gain Morale by making a Rally save at the start of your turn or from Control Points you captured at the end of the round.  Morale Point gains are more rare but Pilot Skills are now cheaper.

Pilot Skills & Elite Units

Pilot Skills have been revamped, with Flash and Iron Wall having clear identities.  Many Skills are now cheaper, while Valor is now integrated into the Finisher system.  Boost / Power / Havoc are now tied into skill usage for Flash / Valor / Zeal. 

Elite Units now have built in passives like improved TN to HIT, DEF or Morale.  Captains play just like regular pilots while Captains orders and Pilot Traits are now upgrade options.

MechaStellar VER11 Design Goals Schedule

  1. VER11 Core Mechanic
    1. Removal of bonus HITs and DEF
    2. Dice pool warfare
    3. How Mech roles & Pilots now provide bonuses
  2. Elite Units
    1. Passive bonuses from Elite Units instead of “remember this trait” making it easier to run a SRW game
    2. Traits and Captain’s orders moving to upgrade options
  3. Pilot Skills
    1. Revamped and cheaper pilot skills
    2. Boost / Power / Havoc and the Finisher Phase
    3. Multiple posts on the evolution of pilot skills
  4. Morale
    1. Changing the pace of Momentum regeneration
    2. Taking the 3 separate momentum generation systems and unifying them
    3. Adjusting roles and mech stats to play into Momentum generation and CP captures
    4. Additional actions
  5. Weapons and the genesis of Triggers
    1. Multiple posts covering different triggers and their evolutions
  6. Expanding Saving Throws beyond Armor Saves
    1. Adjusting lethality of the game

The desired end state for MechaStellar VER11 is to make this version the most fun but also the easier version to teach to you and your friends. As you’re reading through the design goals posts, if you see an opportunity to make the game more fun, simpler or easier to teach, please don’t hesitate to comment and let us know. Thank you all for your support and loyalty over the years.

MechaStellar Battle Report – Space Battleship Yamato 2199 vs Aquatic Zeon in the drowned City

As a follow-on to our previous battle report we had the aquatic zeon force in a partially submerged city fight (using our imagination for the water of course). This time against the crew of Space Battleship Yamato (2199 version). Yamato is well known for having dynamic fights and ever changing scenes, and having it fight inside of a colony, especially a submerged one seemed like it would be on brand for the venerable series.

In addition to the Aqua Zeon force from before, since Yamato is a very expensive unit, we added in a Gelgoog force and several Zaku’s all equipped with Antiship rifles. The odds were stacked against the Yamato crew.

(In this particular game we were not using Squad rules, but we did in subsequent games in the series)

A Black Tri-Star moves to the center point, while a lone Cosmo Tiger II takes the high ground, captures the CP and rains fire down below. (In this map we set a condition that you can only capture the center CP if you take the high ground, which was often a death sentence.)

Yamato does what they do best, BLAZING AHEAD FULL SPEED WITH GUNS LOADED

It uses Havoc to blow up the cover and begin attacking the Hy-Goggs who burn through Momentum. For a moment there, there was a chance that both Hy-Goggs with antiship missiles would get blown off the field.

The Cosmo Tigers begin weaving around the battlefield firing their lasers and capturing control points.

After 5 Cosmo Tigers make strafing runs one of the Black Tri Star goes down!

The Gelgoog team presses forward but the Cosmo Tigers luck their way out of being hit

Meanwhile the ship hunting Zaku team begins blasting away at Yamato.

Since we’re using the 2199 version which has a wave motion barrier, we realize that barriers in general haven’t been updated in a very long time. There’s a long talk about how we want to better reflect them but ultimately it gets put on hold for this game and later games in the test series. It’s been several months since we played this battle report, in the meantime we did update the Barrier rules which you can currently see in the core rules document.

A Cosmo Tiger in reserve ambushes and almost kills a Musai. (This is one of several examples where we realized we needed to put more limits on Reinforcements / Ambush)

A new Round, time for a Gelgoog Cannon to start unloading into the Cosmo Tigers

A Cosmo Tiger takes the high ground and tries to finish off a Gelgoog to no avail, their superior HP pool weathers the laser fire.

Yamato blazes forward, keeps the control point and blasts three amphibious units off the battlefield. In this test series we were demo’ing having [AA] weapons be free counterattacks, which was nice when dealing with superior numbers.

This was the series where we were testing updated warship reactions for increasing AA fire (+X hits on AA weapons and +X DEF vs Missiles) which also helped.

Speaking of, we got lucky on the counter attack and took out another Black Tri Star here.

A Cosmo Tiger finally takes out a Gelgoog, but it’s backside is open and it gets taken down later.

Another Cosmo Tiger finishes off a Gelgoog.

The last Tri-Star plus the Zaku Antiship team kept hammering Yamato until it finally sunk.

With Yamato lost is there any hope left?

Certainly not for Earth, it was carrying the Cosmo Reverse System!!!

Remember the Goggs? Well they decided to ambush this Round and torpedo the Cosmo Tiger on the enemy player’s home CP.

Another Gelgoog down

REVENGE! For sinking the Yamato

Cosmo Tigers unfortunately can’t handle melee

Melee death #2

Melee deaths #3

After Action Report

Overall this was a complete blowout on the Yamato forces and a bit of a shock. Yamato was king in other playtests so we weren’t expecting it to go down so easily, and relatively without a fight. Granted…..Zeon did list-tailor to be antiship focused but still.

As a result of this playtest we made several balance tweaks to Yamato, updated a few core rules for Warships to give Warships more options to increase their chance to hit with regular weapons and [AA] weapons. We also tweaked all the fighters weapons, and adjusted the speeds for jets. This test series was also prior to the Dunbine release which had a major update for all small units which make almost all of them either cheaper or with +1d10 Evade die.

As for Yamato, adjustments to the HP formula helped it a bit, and it sparked an ongoing conversation regarding Barriers. For future games in this test series, we opted for the classic Yamato (sans the Barrier) which held up better. This game in particular resulted in a lot of favorable balance changes to warships and fighters so we hope you enjoy them.

MechaStellar – Monthly Roster Update April 2026 – Nu Gundam and Sazabi

For this month’s update we have the long awaited public release of Nu Gundam and Sazabi.  As well as two other fan favorite mobile suits.  Nu and Sazabi were first used by the Devs all the way back in VER4 and hit closed playtesting in VER6. 

Since then Nu and Sazabi became a favorite pair from one of our all-star playtesters who proceeded to dominate his FLGS all the way back in 2021, if you’ve ever wondered why there were so many updates to Funnels despite very few funnel units (back then), now you know. Nu and Sazabi across many version had their profiles revised a total of 67 times.

Nu and Sazabi are very iconic mobile suits so we’ve put a lot of care into building them and rebuilding them for each version of MechaStellar for our playtesters, and now for the open public.  Of the holy trinity of Super Robot Wars there is Mazinger, Getter Robo and Gundam.  Typically with their final forms being Mazinkaiser, Shin Getter Robo and Nu or Hi-Nu Gundam.

We also included an optional ability for Nu to represent how in crossover games like SRW or Dynasty Warriors, Amuro and the Psycoframe have been able to do incredible things like turning off the Moonlight Butterfly of the Turn-A Gundam. Hope you all enjoy.

While SRW tends to treat Hi-Nu Gundam as a straight upgrade to Nu (and likewise the Nightingale as an upgrade to Sazabi) we prefer to treat them as a side-grade unit which is very similar in armaments but with a slightly different playstyle and unit stats.  After all, Nu and Hi-Nu are meant to be the same unit but different incarnations.

Here’s a synopsis on the origin of Hi-Nu from legendary Gundam expert Mark Simmons

In Beltorchika’s Children, the Nu Gundam is still called the Nu Gundam, even though it does use a mega bazooka launcher at one point. That’s why the cover shows the standard anime Nu Gundam – it’s supposed to be the same thing.

Aside from the Newtype magazine illo that balofo posted, the original source of images for these guys is in the mecha profile section at the beginning of the Beltorchika’s Children novel. The Psyco Doga isn’t pictured in this section, and aside from the Nightingale, all the mecha are listed with the same names and specs and model numbers as the movie versions. (At this point, the movie specs had smaller head heights. That’s why everyone says the Hi-Nu is 20 meters; the book just listed the standard specs for the Nu Gundam, and at that point they were saying the Nu was 20 meters tall.)

So if the Nu Gundam is just called the Nu Gundam in Beltorchika’s Children, and they listed the standard Nu specs and description, where the heck does the “Hi-Nu” come from?

Well, in the book’s mecha section, designer Yutaka Izubuchi took some liberties with his designs and drew them all a bit differently. What we now call the Hi-Nu started out as, simply, “that cool version of the Nu Gundam that Izubuchi drew in the mecha section of Beltorchika’s Children.” It was only later that this cool doodle got its own name and back story and was recognized as a distinct mobile suit. The “Hi” prefix, confusingly, seems to be an homage to the original Hi-Streamer novels. 🙂

Of all these guys, the only one that was reasonably fully depicted and clearly identified as a unique machine was the Nightingale. It’s named that way in the Beltorchika’s Children novel (unlike the Hi-Nu), it’s depicted in the mecha profile section (unlike the Psyco Doga), and Izubuchi drew nice pictures of it for Newtype and B-CLUB magazines. The one thing it didn’t have in the mecha section, unlike the other features machines, was a model number.

Whew! That’s pretty long and detailed, but I’ve seen people getting this mixed up for decades, and I keep hoping that if I explain it one more time it’ll stick.

— Mark

For this April we are releasing Nu Gundam, Sazabi, Hi-Nu Gundam and the Nightingale.  We hope you enjoy these Tier 3 Juggernauts and look forward to more in the future. Pictured above is the Nightingale from the “Gundam Artifact” collection which is slightly larger than 1/400 scale minis but still fits in nicely.

One last note, there have been some minor tweaks to a few of the weapons on the GBF rules.

MechaStellar Battle Report – Big O & Baxingar vs Aqua Zeon in the Drowned City

In this MechaStellar battle report we are keeping the fabulous teamup between the suit wearing Roger Smith (Big O) and the king/queen aesthetics of the J9-II team (Baxingar) face off against Zeon Remnants. Since we’re using a lot of amphibious units, we reasoned it was an abandoned and half submerged city which fits well with some of Big O’s environments.

This game series we were heavily testing our the “Reinforcements” mechanic which would take the Ambusher traits (and event) and turn it into an easy to use core rule. Thanks to this series we managed to avoid a lot of missteps with reinforcements out the gate, but our playtesters found several more loopholes we had to patch within 2 months of release.

While Big O and Baxingar both were able to Ambush, you do need to put at least one unit on the field so in this case Baxingar (in their Cosmo Bike form and thus hard to target) was first.

On Zeon’s side we also had some Musai’s taking part, because we really wanted to laydown the fire support. This was hot off the heels of a QoL update for Warships and they were a lot more fun to use and lot more worthwhile on the battlefield.

In universe, we reasoned that since Big O’s world is very….well, to avoid spoilers, full of mysteries, having space ships appear in the city wouldn’t be out of the ordinary. Who knows, maybe the movie was set in a colony all along.

A Hy-Gogg captures a CP, then Baxingar takes it’s turn firing an Antiship missile to obliterate a Musai and then laser’ing the Hy-Gogg off the field. A powerful turn (and due to this and other games we later realized that Valor should be a Round 2+ only skill.)

The other Musai gets LOS to support it’s allies and begin blasting. Baxingar is an absolutely glass cannon of a unit, but fortunately with the updated Momentum system it had enough Momentum to use Flash several times and dodge some painful hits.

The Black Tri-Stars are the Aces on this side and they start blasting. (We were also briefly tested a squad system in this game, to see how valuable it would be for Ace units; normally it was only for nameless grunts. It was fairly successful, but we found that individually the Black Tri-Stars were more formidable. More to come on the squad system!)

BIG O!! IT’S SHOWTIME!!!

Big O reinforces, in this series we realize that reinforcing units should have either limited movement, limited actions, or both. So we test out this idea several times and come to a reasonable solution that doesn’t allow for Reinforcing units to show up, blindside nuke a unit, then capture a CP all in one go.

Speaking of Blindside. Some Goggs reinforced on the enemy side last Round, as a limiting factor we let them attack if they used Zeal. Which they were happy to launch megaparticles supported by torpedos pods into Baxingars backside.

Round 2 Big O pulverizes that Z’Gok and captures the point.

Baxingar clears out the home CP by destroying both Goggs. We were testing out the “Tear through the Ranks” as a melee option instead of an event here, which we really enjoyed so it made it back into the Core Rules.

A Hy-Gogg on the Hy-Ground with an antiship missile. Who should send that into? The agile but glass cannon Baxingar, or the slow moving heavily armored Big O?? Hmmm

Big O withstands the blast then we proceed to beat down the Hy-Gogg. It’s at this moment we realize we should add something in the core rules to mention that very tall units can melee units on the high ground because…well look at this picture lmao

Two of the Black Tri-Stars move into position to Blindside Big O later.

The third Tri-Star gets a lucky critical and blows Baxingar off the board. While we made several of the aquatic units Elite to punch above their weightclass, the Black Tri-Stars ended up carrying the game.

Time to Chrome Buster and blow up the terrain and the Tri-Stars

Big O managed to take down 2 of them, but alas the third one got a blinside attack and then won initiative in the final round for another blindside attack. The ground shakes as the giant crashes down into the earth.

After Action Report

We ended up tweaking several of the aquatic units after this, since they didn’t feel as durable (or as cheap) as they could have been. Big O went through several revisions and one of our outspoken players, really loves this unit so we wanted to get it right. Eventually Big O went up a size tier (to reflect it’s weight, rather than it’s official height) which gave it a considerable HP boost and more slots.

This game we also tested out the squad systems for regular units as well as for elite units. We had tested it out a little before but this version felt a lot more stable and less likely to be all or nothing.

We also had a lot of fun with the Zeon team and ended up using them again versus a remarkably different force. Space Battleship Yamato complete with Cosmo Tiger squadrons. Stay tuned for more!

MechaStellar Battle Report – Freedom & Justice vs Sandrock, Heavyarms & Deathscythe Hell EW Versions

In this MechaStellar battle report we have Freedom and Justice from Gundam SEED facing off against Gundam Deathscythe Hell, Sandrock Kai and Heavy Arms Kai from Endless Waltz. It’s a highly mobile Gundam on Gundam battle with both sides rocking some heavy assault units.

This game was used to test out the updated Starting Momentum mechanics (both players starting closer to 10 Momentum, instead of ~4 for Ace games) as well as the Battle Damage mechanic which allows Elite Units to lose weapons, shields, arms and legs to stay in the fight. Both these rules have made it into the current rules for MechaStellar VER10.

Keep reading for the battle report.

Forces

Gundam SEED

  • Justice Gundam (1000pts+150) – Commander
    • +50pts Boost+1
    • +50pts Melee Expert
    • +50pts Guard Expert
  • Freedom Gundam (1000pts+100)
    • +50pts Boost+1
    • +50pts Additional Pilot Trait – Renowned Pilot Hit on a 3+

Gundam Wing Endless Waltz (EW)

  • Sandrock Custom EW (750pts) – Commander
  • Heavy Arms Custom EW (750pts)
  • Deathscythe Hell EW (750pts)

Round 1

Freedom is up first, takes a shot at Sandrock then uses Boost to hide behind a building. Sandrock moves center stage and ducks behind LOS cover. Justice moves up and blocks access to Freedom and once again shoots at Sandrock, but neither Freedom nor Justice are able to scratch it at this range.

Heavy Arms moves up and and thanks to Quattre’s strategist trait get’s Support ATK from it’s allies before releasing a micromissiles barrage at Justice and causes minor damage, Deathscythe moves up and the buster shield manages to inflict significant damage.

The Round ends with no damage to the Endless Waltz Team and significant damage to Justice. Both teams start Round 2 with 8+ Momentum.

Round 2

Freedom is up first, dives in front of Justice and unloads it’s Balena plasma cannons into both Deathscythe and Heavy Arms burning through Mometum at the EW team. Quattre also used Strategist to pump up Support DEF on both units. Freedom then uses Hi-MATS and unloads with the Railguns and Beam Rifle on Deathscythe inflicting decent damage.

Freedom then retreats behind Justice.

Heavy Arms activates next, moves up once again and uses Zeal to attack with it’s Quad Gatling Guns and Micromissiles on Justice, unfortunately scoring no Finishing blows but dealing minor damage.

Justice is up next, uses Hi-Mats to attack with it’s beam boomerang, Beam Cannons with the Fatum Backpack Blindside, Beam Rifle, Vulcans and lastly a beam saber, nearly destroying Deathscythe and disabling his Buster Shield in the process.

Athrun went with Swift Strikes in Melee to disengage and retreat back to the Control Point.

Deathscythe slices into Justice but thanks to Flash manages to avoid all but a single hit, and fails the Armor Save. The total damage however forces Athrun into SEED mode, which is crucial right before Sandrock’s melee assault.

Both Quatre and Athrun get extremely lucky on their attack and defense rolls and Justice survives.

Round 3

Both sides are hovering just above empty on Momentum. Freedom decides to take a big risk, let’s see if it plays off.

Freedom uses Boost to fly up to the center point. With Hi-Mats he uses the Beam Rifle + Plasma Cannon on Heavy Arms and the Railguns on Deathscythe. Thanks to Trowa’s daredevil trait, they have just enough Momentum for 1 Flash, and so he avoids a crit-filled beam rifle shot, while Deathscythe gets pummeled with the railguns.

The Plasma cannons from the High Ground would have destroyed Heavy Arms but instead disabled all weapon systems save for the Gatling Guns.

Freedom tries for Vulcans to finish him off but HeavyArms holds out. Freedom really wanted to retain the high ground (the Control Point can only be captured on top the building) but doesn’t want to leave Heavy Arms to retaliate, and so with a beam saber he rushes in and strikes him down.

Both sides are out of Momentum.

Deathscythe rushes in, thanks to Momentum Shift he’s got enough to use Focus on his Melee Attack, the decisive blow has several failed Armor Saves + Finishing Blow, crippling and destroying Freedom.

It’s now 2-on-1, Athrun has only one chance to seize victory.

He starts with melee against sandrock, using swift strikes and disengages afterwards. He uses the beam boomerang now outside of melee to finish off Sandrock (remember both sides are out of Momentum). He uses his 2nd Hi-MATs activation to fire his guns into Deathscythe finishing him off.

Winner Team SEED!

After Action Report

SEED Player

I really like the changes to starting Momentum, in the older rules one of us would start at M=6 for Skilled pilots and M=4 for Ace pilots, here we started at M=10 and M=8, it made Round 1 a lot less vicious and I think opens up some more options since we’re less worried about getting Alpha strikes by bringing extra Aces.

Although we’re not always used to this playstyle yet, so in Round 1 we got into the hold habit of trying to avoid using any Momentum and so we finished Round 1 fully topped off haha.

Freedom and Justice keep performing well, although I was pretty sad I lost Freedom here and never got to activate Kira’s SEED mode. I was also pretty jealous of Strategist on the Wing side, it really saved them when I unloaded with Zeal. Still it was a good game and I got pretty lucky at the end for this game playing agressive. In other games, I spent a lot more time playing keep away, but sometimes I’d lose too many control points and I couldn’t catch up.

Gundam Wing EW Player

I also like the changes we’re using here, especially bringing back Battle Damage to the Core Rules. Battle Damage is a bit more streamlined, borrowing some lessons learned we had from the older Stellar Warships module, and now having the option to sacrifice weapons can give these units more longevity when the pressure is on. In other games, this means units live to Round 5 (or don’t die at all) but we wanted to feature this battle in the test series because it had a really dramatic turn of events with a lot of casualties in Round 3.

Overall, I’m really enjoying the tuned up Gundam Wing Endless Waltz units, they are a lot more durable than before. I really need to try them out against masses units of Leos, Aries, Taurus, & Virgos in the future.

MechaStellar Battle Report – Freedom & Justice vs Calamity, Raider & Forbidden

In this MechaStellar battle report we have a classic Gundam SEED battle with Freedom and Justice vs the drug enhanced biological computers for Calamity, Raider and Forbidden Gundam. As a bonus, there’s a short one on one fight between Freedom and Providence at the end. This test series was done when we were prototyping all the SEED units, whenever possible we like to demo out specific battles or moments from the show to see how well it plays out on the tabletop as well.

In this case though, the evil trio from SEED ended up being harder to kill than expected.

Points were still being adjusted at the time for both sides, but the dark trio were short on points and so brought a squad of Strike Daggers with them to capture Control Points (CPs). The Strikes are proxies for Strike Daggers shown above.

With Justice having a strong defense most games wound up with Justice boosting to capture the central CP, and Calamity going for a rapid fire barrage and forbidden doing the same.

To play up the teamwork / best-friends angle we see in the show, anytime Justice or Freedom was badly damaged, we would have the other Gundam stand in front of LOS to take all future attacks. This game series was before we applied the global “-1 Hit” to all units, and so Justice was taking a lot of hits early on, Freedom intervened and fires it’s AOE Plasma Cannons.

The Strike Daggers continue their mission of accelerating towards the CP. The D.Trio player was hesitant to start them too far up the board since he was worried either Freedom or Justice would Zeal and wipe them out too early. So Round 1 & 2 was spent moving towards a center line CP. (In this game series, 3 Control points were on the center line in no-man’s land).

Raider goes for the flank and captures a CP for some so both sides own 2 CPs. It’s hyper machine guns were effective at draining Momentum. (In an old prototype of the rules, the N-Jammer Cancellers for Freedom and Justice provided unlimited phase shift, but excessive hits would stun the pilots unless they burned Momentum. It ended up being a cumbersome system and so we opted for the current version of Phase Shift, that while not show accurate, still provides a hefty defense vs [K] weapons.

A battle shot of Forbidden trying to swoop in and scythe through Freedom, but Kira + SEED mode held the line. This was back in the time where SEED (and the related Berserker / Killer instinct abilities) were overtuned and providing too large of a critical range bonus, with consistently good rolls of 7+ Freedom and Justice would be invincible as we found in some other ace matches vs Gundam Wing pilots and also Physalis / The O.

Speaking of wiping out daggers, Freedom disengaged capped that control panel and blew up most of that squad. (We briefly tested squad mechanics in this battle in July 2025, but 6 months later it’s still not quite ready yet).

Calamity unloads on Freedom with Zeal, using it’s shield beams, bazooka, and beam cannons and Kira’s lucky dice eventually failed him.

Justice goes into melee with Calamity but fails to destroy it, and the CP is contested while Raider captures the enemy CP. It’s Round 2 and the Freedom / Justice team now have 0 CPs, while the D.Trio have 4…

Round 3 and Athrun captures a control point, and Calamity can’t move fast enough to contest it. However, Raider is able to swoop from behind. The enemy team is generating too much Momentum and Athrun isn’t able to defeat them by himself.

After Action Report

We ran this game series for 10 play tests, and the SEED Trio of Calamity, Raider and Forbidden won every time. We weren’t expecting that since Freedom / Justice had been on a roll in every other game. I think this is one of the first series we did where one team focused heavily on defense and it worked out really well, we rarely have a game series where all three protagonist (or antagonist) units survive through 5 rounds.

We learned a lot from this series and it helped us decide on which way we wanted to move forward with on Phase Shift, lowering lethality across the board, and on certain weapons. We also continued to run Freedom and Justice in other series just to verify they weren’t weak (they aren’t) they just happen to have an achilles heel facing Calamity, Raider and Forbidden.

Bonus Report

While we are reenacting battles, we decided to do Freedom vs Providence a couple times to see if 1-vs-1 games were more fun compared to VER9.

While MechaStellar is primarily a wargame, a number of our players really love doing 2v2 Ace battles. 1v1 leaves a bit to be desired, since positioning (especially for blindside) doesn’t matter as much.

Unless of course you go 2nd in one Round, position yourself for Blindside, and then go first in the next Round. This was a fun test game and helped us adjust Dragoons a bit, we had also started experimenting with “Free attack” weapons like Vulcans, and Shield beams (and also warship beams) all the way back in June / July 2025 but not all of that made it into public release immediately. We knew it was a big change so we wanted to iron that one before releasing, especially since Funnels were ultra broken in playtesting when we first did them in VER6 (and our playtesters will likely say they stayed broken all through VER8 hahaha)

Overall a fun test for the game, it was around 60/40 with Freedom vs Providence win rates. It was also good to test out the various climactic events and tweak them as needed.

This report was written long after the fact when we discovered the test photos, so it’s not as in-depth as other battle reports so instead we decided to focus on what was changing and what was being tested. Hope you enjoyed reading

MechaStellar Battle Report – Gundam Seed vs Shin Mazinger & Getter

In this battle report we have a 2000pt game using the MechaStellar VER10 rules, one side we have the SEED Duo of Kira and Athrun piloting the Freedom and Justice Gundams. On the other side we the iconic Koji Kabuto in the Mazinger Z with the God Scrander as well as the OG Getter Team of Ryoma, Hyato and Musashi in Getter Robo. (We’re using the Armageddon Black version since we’ve customized this 300pt unit into a 1010 point unit.)

In this cross universe game, the SEED Duo are facing off against two of the most iconic Super Robots. Read on below the break to see the results of the battle report.

Continue reading “MechaStellar Battle Report – Gundam Seed vs Shin Mazinger & Getter” →

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – QoL Adjustments

The latest update has quite a bit of changes both to the Core Rules, Wargaming supplement and the Unit Profile sheets.  In this post we’ll cover a brief overview.   Which we’ve broken into three segments.  Some of these we will cover more in depth in follow-up posts.  For the first segment let’s cover Quality of Life QoL updates.

HexaStellar Update

The forthcoming Gundam Assemble will introduce Gundam wargaming on a  hex scale to the world.  We’re really excited for it!  We also wanted to make MechaStellar compatible with Hexes (and also square grids) for people who don’t like using tape measures.  We’ve made all ranges divisible by 4 for Sensors, Movement, and Weapon ranges.  In general, around half of all units ended up receiving a movement boost, so you should have some more mobility in your games.  We’ve also updated facing rules to be easier to use with hexes where turning 90 degrees is not as easy.

Challenge Update

We got some feedback from a regular player that Challenge had a big loophole where if you are down to a 1-on-1 game, the player going second wouldn’t be able to challenge and thus it would invalidate a lot of the challenge focused pilot traits if they lost initiative.  We’ve fixed this and now allow for Challenge to be declared before any unit activates.

Pilot Traits

Recently we’ve got some playtest feedback that some of the Pilot Traits were getting a little too lethal.  Previously Reaper (+2 Hits, +2 Crits vs Challenge) and Ruthless (+4 Hits on Counter / IDF / AOE) were so powerful on a turn by turn basis, that even relatively nimble mobile suits were still getting one shot even when maxing out defense bonuses.  We haven’t done an overhaul on pilot traits for a while, so we took our old notes along with the new feedback.  Overall, we ended up consolidating a lot of pilot traits to having a shared Level 1 origin, that branches out to a stronger or more varied Level II effect.  A lot of the insta-picks like the level 1 version of Reaper, are now Level 2 only for that reason.  Overall, we’re happy with pilot traits becoming a little simpler and easier to remember while taking away some of the lethality there.

Oh and as a bonus you can now take a 2nd Level II trait in the upgrade rules.  Look forward to this on the Captain Harlock sheets.  (Do note, Warship rebalances are taking a long time, so they likely won’t be ready for another couple weeks).

MechaStellar Design Goals – SEP25 Update – Starting Momentum

In the previous post we talked about several items in the MechaStellar SEP 2025 roster update. In this post we’ll cover Starting Momentum in-depth.

Momentum is one MechaStellar’s defining features, and has been for quite a few years now.  It’s a game system we’re really proud of, momentum represents the collective skill, luck, morale of your forces will ebb and flow during battle.  In the switch to VER10 Momentum could start at a flat 10, which was greatly in the early drafts, but with some major overhauls to the pilot system, starting Momentum was also much lower.  We’ve been experimenting with several options and finally came up with a winner we’re happy with and play testers are happy with, some are even overjoyed.

We went through a lot of different experiments of starting Momentum, perhaps too many haha.  One we tried to stick with was to quantify, Battle-Tested / Skilled / Ace units, and how much Momentum they would drain.  We eventually settled on -1/2 (round up), -1 and -2 starting Momentum.  This was fine, but we still ran into problems where, let’s say you wanted to run a Gundam SEED Le Creuset team, and you’re starting off with M-6 still (4 Skilled and 1 Ace). 

While it was relatively fair, when comparing teams, we still wound up with very low starting Momentum overall.  This was also in a time period where playtesters discovered some good turn 1 Alpha Strikes, and the need for higher starting Momentum become very apparent.

We eventually solved this by retaining the current comparison method, but now there’s a chance both players will start with M=10 or M=8, where historically it was often M=6 vs M=4.  This comparison method has both players count up their “Elite Units”.  The person with less Elite points, starts with M=10, the other players starts with the difference.

For example let’s say we have Kira and Mwu (2x Ace = 4) vs the Le Creuset Team (4x Skill + Ace = 6), a difference of 2.  Kira and Mwu start with 10, while the Le Creuset team start with the difference (10-2=8).  This gave A LOT more flexibility for people who like running thematic forces with lots of Elite units on both sides.  You can also still field a grunt force vs an elite force and have a huge gap in Momentum.

Overall, we kept the same feel of the current Momentum system while overall massively improving the amount of starting Momentum.  This is both good for balance and QoL in our opinion.  Hope you all enjoy!