Cyberpunk Edgerunners from Monster Flight Club is a 2-player starter set for the popular Combat Zone game with Edgerunner-specific factions. The game comes with 24 full-color acrylic StandUpz â„¢, but MFC also sells packs of miniatures. The question then becomes: Minis or StandUpz?
Making a case for Standees
Imagine this scenario. You go to your local game store and see a sexy looking 2-player starter set for Combat Zone. The box cover pulls you in, and you can’t help but take it home. You grab a buddy and crack the box open, excited to play with your new toys, only to be greeted by a mountain of sprues and a link to a website for assembly instructions. You sigh as you put the lid back on the box and place it on your shelf, promising yourself that you will assemble and paint the minis soon so you can actually play the game. Five years later, you wipe the dust off the box before handing it over in that Facebook Marketplace deal, with regret for what could have been.
Now imagine you open the box, and there are actually no minis inside, but a set of full-color acrylic standees that are ready to get you into the action? A couple of tedious minutes of peeling plastic film off, and you are ready to game. Which one of these scenarios would you prefer? Would you be disappointed to not have minis?
Why Standees just might be the better option for you.
I don’t know about you, but I have enough minis to keep me painting for the rest of my life. Those little gray lumps of potential are just so dang fun to play with, and I often can’t resist adding just one more to my collection despite the ever-growing backlog of unpainted shame. There are times, though, when the thought of having to assemble another set of minis for a game I don’t even know if I like has turned me away from trying something new. The time just to reach a playable state doesn’t always feel worth it, and that’s just to have a field of unpainted gray minis. In this case, the point has to go to standees. The ability to play the game right away without spending hours or days prepping minis first is hard to ignore. What if I actually don’t like the game at all and just spent all that time messing around with gluing little plastic guns together? With the included StandUpz, I can get a few games in quickly and then decide if I want to commit the extra time and energy into upgrading the game with minis or if I am happy to just keep the StandUpz. From a new player onboarding perspective, it’s a big win.
To be totally fair, the minis in Combat Zone don’t actually require any assembly. They are cast as single pieces and just need to be glued to a base, but they do need to be painted. I think the point still stands.
The Pros and Cons.
Ok, being practical with your time is all well and good, but how do the standees look? They look pretty freaking great. The printed image is nice and crisp with clear details and saturated colors (as long as you remember to peel the film off first). Each one has complete front and back images for maximum detail. If they were cardboard, I would not like them at all, but with clear acrylic, they look great on the table.
Now what if you decide to start buying some miniature packs, but want to use them in the same game as some standees? The scale between the two is spot on. Side by side, the standees are just a hair shorter, but that is only because the bases are thinner. Having a mix of minis and standees in the same game honestly doesn’t look bad. The standees are just that good.
There is one big negative to the standees. You can’t go all in on them. I’m not one to commit to one game and spend all of my time and hobby money on that one game. I like to try lots of things and bounce around between games. Combat Zone is a fun game, but it’s not my primary minis game. Since I am already spending a lot of hobby time painting up minis for other games, I love the standees in Combat Zone and would love it even more if I could keep expanding the game with more faction sets of standees. Unfortunately, outside of the starter factions, it doesn’t look like MFC offers standee options for the expansion gangs, so I will have to choose between picking up more minis to paint or just not expanding the game. That’s a bummer, because I would definitely grow my standee collection before I would want to buy more minis.
The minis deserve love too.
Alright, it’s pretty clear that I think the standees are great, but the minis deserve some love too. As I mentioned earlier, the minis in Combat Zone are cast as a single piece. That means no assembly is required, but it does mean a nice mold line all the way around that needs to be cleaned up. Overall prep time is still faster than cleaning up a bunch of little sprue marks on a multi-part mini.
Need help with prepping your minis? GamingTrend has a guide for that:
Alec Kozak
The minis have a nice level of detail without being too complicated to paint. When painted up, they look great on the table and help to bring the game to life in a way that the standees can’t quite achieve. Despite my love for the standees, they give off board game vibes, whereas the minis make it feel like a real war game. The story you are telling over the course of your game feels more real when played with minis. I don’t really know why; that’s just how it works.
Which would you choose?
At the end of the day, it's a personal choice. At least, until you want to keep expanding the game. I wish MFC would offer the full product line in standee form. The minis are great, but for ease of getting into the game and not adding to my hobby backlog, I’d go standees all the way.
Would you play more games if standees were an option, or do you require all 3 dimensions to get into a game? Let me know in the comments, and check the Combat Zone link below for a ton of other articles GamingTrend has on the game.
