Ultimate Guide for Sleeving Your Board Games 2024

Board games are expensive, so protecting your cards should be on the mind of any board game owner who wants to protect their beloved games from reckless kids, spills, and that one friend who doesn’t wash their hands after eating all the Doritos. But which are the best sleeves for your board games? In this article we’ll take a look at sleeve quality, quantity, and price for different leading sleeve brands, and give our personal opinion and experience.

Sleeving your board game can be expensive, mostly if you buy quality sleeves. It depends a lot on how many cards there are, and the size of those cards. For example, the core box of Marvel Champions has 343 cards. We sleeve ours with Dragon Shield Matte Clear sleeves, which costs £9.45 per box of 100 from our affiliate retailer Zatu*, which means we effectively spent £37.80 on 4 boxes of sleeves alone (with some change from sleeves we can use for other games). The cost of the game on Zatu* is currently £52.99, which means we spent well over 50% of the game’s cost to sleeve it!

Numbers like this make people not want to sleeve their games, or simply buy the cheapest possible sleeves. That is a big mistake!

Let’s go over some options for sleeves we recommend, as well as some sleeves that people get fooled into buying, and why we don’t recommend them.

When you first look at sleeves, it’s easy to think that the sizes are standardised, with names like “mini” and “standard”, but in all honesty the manufacturers may as well have named their sizes after Greek gods or mountain ranges for all those names actually matter. As I mentioned, Gamegenic and Dragon shield have different understandings of “standard”, but also there is “American standard”, “European standard” and “Japanese standard”, and none of these are actually… well… standards. So before you go buying sleeves, make a note of the sizes of your cards. Even the smallest millimetre makes a difference!

There are several things you need to take into account when dealing with sleeves.

1. Size matters to the millimetre. One millimetre smaller and the card won’t fit.
2. Don’t buy perfect/ideal fits. Your sleeve should never be perfectly fitting your cards. The space on the sides it’s called a ‘buffer’ and it’s very important to prevent cards from scratching, bending and leaving the sleeve. That said, too much buffer is bad, as it will bend the sleeve and make it less effective. You want about 1-2 mm.
3. Check the dimensions on the pack, not the size name used by the provider. As mentioned above, there is no universal naming standard, so the names mean nothing.

Once you’ve figured out how different manufacturers refer to the size of card that you want, it’s often a good idea to stick with the same manufacturer to ensure you don’t end up with sleeves that are sized differently.

And lastly you can measure them. If you measure your cards make sure you measure them in millimetres, and that every millimetre counts. Most boxes and packs of sleeves will have the dimensions in the metric system. Bringing one of your cards to a local game shop and measuring it against the pack is absolutely an option!

Some popular games such as Catan, Ticket to Ride, Dominion, or 7 Wonders, can be mentioned on the packs of sleeves, on the manufacturer’s page, or even in the game shop. But that is not a very reliable way mostly for less popular games, so go prepared.

When you look at the packs you will see different terms that sound like they are describing what to expect from the sleeves, but there’s a lot to get your head around. Here’s a quick list of some terms you might see:

• Clear. Self explanatory. The sleeve is transparent and you can clearly see the image. While these are nice, they can be slippier than other sleeves, and might have glare in brightly lit rooms. BGS and Gamegenic clear sleeves also don’t have that much glare to them but can’t vouch for other brands.
• Frost or Non Glare. These sleeves will look a bit cloudier. While I don’t have a problem with that, Matt, for example, hates how the images look and sometimes has trouble reading cards across the table. They might also be bad for people with bad eyesight, and if you don’t hold the cards in your hands they can be a lot harder to read.
• Matte. This means the sleeve is not very glossy and slippery. They have resistance, so they will be easier to pick up from the table, and won’t slide around as much. We highly recommend getting this type of sleeve.
• Microns (µ). this is how thick the sleeve is. You want to aim at around 70-100µ. Higher micron thickness means that the sleeves will be thicker and when put together the cards will take more space. Around 50µ (I don’t think they go lower) are far too thin, and that is usually what penny sleeves are.
• Soft. This means the sleeve has a soft feeling to them. Not a lot of significance except they just feel really nice to shuffle and play with.
• Perfect or ideal fit. Don’t buy these. These are sleeves made to perfectly fit your cards (no buffer) and are for double sleeving only (for Trading Card Games).
• PVC-free & Acid-free. This is a term left over from comic book collecting. As most sleeves on the market are PVC and acid free, I won’t go into details. What this generally means is that the sleeves are not harmful for your cards, but you’ll probably only get sleeves that harm your cards if you buy some weird knock-off brand because they’re cheaper. As previously mentioned – don’t cheap out on your sleeves!

Generally we recommend clear sleeves for your board games. A lot of games identify decks and cards based on their backs, and that’s open knowledge you’re supposed to have to play the game. Unless you want to buy different colours for different decks, there is not a lot of point paying more coloured back sleeves over clear. As coloured-back sleeves are mandatory for competitive trading card games, they might not come in the size you need for your board game.

That being said, there is a place for coloured-back sleeves, for example with Marvel Champions, we have our individual decks with coloured sleeves to tell our decks apart, as we’re both using similar player cards that can be played under each others’ control, and it can be easy to get cards from each others’ decks mixed up in certain situations.

There are some things to consider before buying a bunch of sleeves to sleeve your favourite board game. Because of the buffer when sleeving cards, they will be wider than originally printed, and because of the thickness of the sleeves, the decks will be taller. This means that in general they will take more space. Space that most board game publishers don’t consider when creating their inserts. For example, one of our favourites, Mysterium Park, which fits so nicely in the box, won’t fit with sleeved cards, which is deeply annoying. That means you will have to get rid of your insert, modify it (if that’s even possible), or have a look through Etsy and see if you can find a custom printed insert for your box that fits sleeved cards, or even a custom storage box if you really love a game.

This can be an expense that costs even more than the game itself, so you have to consider very well how often you play this game, who you play it with and is it even worth the extra investment.

We heavily recommend sleeving your favourite games. That being said, we also understand that some games might not see a lot of play, and others might end up cheaper to just replace the game when it gets damaged than sleeving and buying inserts. Regardless of what you chose to do, we hope this helped you understand the complicated world of sleeving board games.

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