MechaStellar has a huge roster of mobile suits, super robots, kaiju and various other mech profiles you can use to battle it out on the tabletop. Still depending on what size of figure you want to use, whether it be small miniatures (1.5 to 3 inches) like the very common Gundam 1/400 miniatures or larger model kits and figures (5 to 8 inches) like the very common 1/144 Gunpla kits you will eventually run into some mech profiles that don’t have any miniatures or model kits.
Fear not! There is an incredibly easy and inexpensive option you can use to proxy figures called a Standee. They are also great in a pinch, if your friend wants to use [INSERT MOBILE SUIT] and you don’t have that in your collection.
Standee
A Standee is common on board games, where a small piece of plastic holds up a card of a character or monster. You can easily do this to represent your esoteric favorite machine or kaiju in MechaStellar. We’ll walk you through an example in this post.
Step 1 – Find an Image of the Mech / Monster
Preferrably you want an image with a white background to make it easier to print. For our example we want the Virgo, an amazing mass produced unit from Gundam Wing with very few models or miniatures available. Head over to your favorite website, and download the image.
Step 2 – Insert the image, Adjust Parameters & Print
For this example we’re using Microsoft word since the size you enter is generally what gets printed off.
When you insert the image, change the text wrapping so that it is “Behind Text”. This makes it easier to copy paste and rearrange.
In this example, we are going to make the Standee around the same size as the Mobile Suit in Action range of which we have several Gundam Wing Figures. So we make it 4 inches in height. For microsoft word we can fit 3 of these in one row, and fit two rows on one page for a total of 6 mobile suits on piece of paper.
If instead you want to use these at 1/144 scale, do a quick google search to verify the height. In this case you would do 4.4 inches for the height instead.
When you Print make sure you use cardstock. This way the paper is firm and stands up straight.
If you don’t have card stock available and just regular printer paper, you can grab a piece of cardboard and glue / tape it. But cardstock is much simpler in my experience.
Step 3 – Place the printed Mech / Monster on a standee base.
You can buy clear acrylic standee bases for very cheap. For example here’s a set of 48 for <$10
For small units you only need one standee, for larger units you might need 2 to make it easier to balance depending on how tall your paper is.
For a very large mobile armor like Hashmal we used 3 Standees to make it standup without falling over.
As a bonus example, for this one we just did a quick approximation on size since we were using 1/200 size figures. Hashmal was 5.5 inches tall, while the Plumas are 1.7 inches tall. We could fit one Hashmal and 6x Plumas on a single page.
That’s all there is to it, Standees are a cheap and easy way to use Mobile Suits, Super Robots, and Kaiju that have a hard to track down model kit / figure, or never had one in the first place. As is the case of many of the very interesting Kaiju designs in Getter Robo or Mazinger Z.
