I Will Not Sleeve My Cards

Somewhere in the board game internet there’s a consensus that you sleeve your cards, period, no exceptions, and if you don’t you’re basically asking for warped edges and a shorter shelf life on a game you paid real money for. I get the logic. I’ve written it myself in a review or two, told people to budget for sleeves on a card heavy game because the shuffling alone will chew through cheap stock. And then I go home and don’t sleeve a single one of my own cards, and I’ve decided I’m done feeling vaguely guilty about that contradiction.

Here’s the actual reason, not the excuse I usually give people when they ask. Sleeving takes time I don’t have in the volume I’d need it, I’ve got maybe ninety minutes on a good weeknight between the kids going down and my own eyes giving out, and I don’t want to spend twenty of those minutes peeling sleeves onto four hundred cards before I can even find out if a game is any good. If it turns out to be a keeper, sure, then maybe it earns the investment. Most games I play once or twice before they either stick or get traded off, and a card that’s been shuffled fifteen times in its whole life doesn’t need the protection a card that’s been shuffled fifteen hundred times does.

The other part of it, and this is the part that sounds worse out loud, is that I kind of like watching a deck wear in. There’s a Clank deck on my shelf right now with a slightly soft corner on the dragon attack card from getting drawn and discarded so many times, and I know exactly which plays put that wear there because I remember them. A pristine sleeved deck doesn’t carry any of that. It’s the same argument some people make for buying physical books over an ereader, the object itself accumulates a little bit of your history with it, a coffee ring, a bent corner, a crease on the spine where it always falls open.

I’m not telling anyone else to skip sleeves, and if you’ve got a legacy game or something with genuine collector value sitting on your shelf, ignore everything I just said and go buy the good ones. This is just me finally admitting in writing that the advice I hand out and the habit I actually keep aren’t the same thing, and that I’ve made my peace with that gap rather than closing it.