I’ve enjoyed it broadly, but this play was awful. Previously we’d played at 3p and 4p; this time we tried it at 5p. And there was a severe turn order problem. The fifth player was locked out of the final two scoring opportunities entirely. Scores were ranked in descending order. Everybody was complaining about it, including the first player, who felt like she kept nabbing all the opportunities before anybody else. We think it’s a problem with that higher count, because we hadn’t noticed it in any of our other plays.
Thanks. There will only be 2 of us, the wife “might” play but highly doubtful.
Woohoo! I’m looking forward to these fo sho!
Yeah! WhollySchmidt, shut your dirty game mouth. Totally have to use coin capsules. How else can you use those intruder tokens for Nemesis? My copy is perfect. Ha ha!
Except they don’t make hexagon capsules for the event tokens .
In all seriousness, I don’t know how people can afford to sleeve every game they own. I tend to sleeve games I intend to sell or really love and only if they’re going to get a lot of use. Example: Merchants and Marauders has cargo cards that get shuffled on practically ever turn. So I sleeved those, Netrunner, Nemesis, etc. I have used coin capsules for Nemesis because I liked the weight they added to intruder tokens (and it was cheaper than a poker chip alternative) and AVP because their character tokens were so thin and they need to be moved around the board all the time.
Pizzaddict,
Now the next question is, which sleeves do you use?
Pet peeves of sleeves:
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When you buy a sleeve of a certain size from one company and it is no where near the same size, clarity, or thickeness as a sleeve from another company.
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When sleeves come in packs of 100 only for your game to have 101 cards.
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When you buy or trade a game with someone and they have sleeved the game but don’t know what sleeves they used and you need to sleeve additional cards.
I sleeve anything that involves a lot of shuffling. It’s not so bad with the current TitanShield sleeves I’m using which are about 7p a sleeve.
But shuffling is so much slower and harder with sleeves.
It’s the opposite for me. Mighty not be faster, but it’s much easier with sleeves.
I think I used Arcane Tinman for a couple games and the ones I just got for Munchkin were Mayday sleeves. Not sure if those are good or not but they were on sale at Amazon and the size I needed so that was what I got.
I haven’t sleeved any games since like 1999. A card game can easily be played a couple of hundred times before wear and tear starts becoming an issue. For games where the cards are secondary components it’ll take even longer. That happens so rarely that I don’t mind buying a second copy (the only ones I remember it happening to were Race for the Galaxy and Die Sieben Siegel).
And sleeves just suck: sleeved cards take up a lot more space, they tend to make for very unstable thick decks, they can’t be riffle-shuffled, they’re uncomfortable to handle due to the sharp corners.
The only places where I’d consider an exception are home-translated foreign games, where slipping the translation + card into a sleeve is easier than doing stickers, or genuinely rare / impossible to replace games.
I’m glad that sleeving isn’t something you need to do.
I would be careful about using wording to express something that is true for you as something that is true universally and for everyone, however.
When I lived on the east coast of the US, I had to sleeve most games, because the cards would start to warp, otherwise. Not a huge thing, but I’m not a fan of clicky, curved cards. And a decently thick sleeve helped prevent that in a lot of cases.
Where I live now, thankfully I’m not seeing any warping…which is GREAT. I probably won’t need to sleeve cards for new games, and I can ditch the sleeves on other games if I want.
With that said, I still play Pathfinder Adventure Card Game with opaque, colored sleeves because the print runs for that game created visible changes in the color scale of the card backs that identifies cards as being from certain decks when you play. And I say this as someone who cannot usually easily distinguish that pattern change…but with PACG it’s very noticeable.
And a good, marble-backed sleeve is just a delight to shuffle, for me. Others may feel the same. And I’d bet a lot of folks couldn’t disagree with that more profusely.
Sleeving can be good when an expansion adds fresh cards to a worn deck. Or just cards with an obviously different back, publishers are remarkably bad about that.
I use UltraPro matte sleeves for all standard sized cards. They kill most of the glare, and they aren’t as slippery as some others.
I use Sleeve Kings for everything else. You get 110 in a pack instead of 100, and they’re mid thickness which is perfect in my mind. Not too thin, not too thick.
And, as Wendelius said, sleeved cards are much easier to shuffle.
A voice cries out in the wilderness! Worry not about wear and tear on your cards, for it is but a sign of LOVE. Indeed, I say to you: There is no greater love than to sacrifice the mint condition of one’s board games for the joy of one’s friends! Lo, though you may not remember all the good times had, your games in their scuffed boxes do remember, if you but let them.
Also, fuck–Sleeves get expensive!
You’re buying the wrong sleeves. There are some great no name sleeves out there.
I mean, when I’m already on a budget for buying games in the first place, I don’t need to make them any more expensive.
But anyway, the first argument is my real argument (believe it or not): Let your games show their history of play!
I get that.
I buy a lot of games and I sell a lot of games to pay for new games etc. So sleeving keeps them in good shape for that and the games I play a ton like Nemesis, etc get to a point where you can literally tell the card from it’s back.
Spirit Island Kickstarter went up yesterday (Backerkit actually) and color me a little concerned with the direction of the game.
They seem to be adding more tokens to how the game operates, and I actually feel that the game is already kind of at max playability with the existing expansions. I’m a bit concerned that an already brain burner of a game is going to have more AP and more fiddliness.
It doesn’t help that the crowdfunding campaign itself is a bit of a joke. Limited add-ons, and it is actually cheaper to buy everything from their store now then to buy the bundles (not even including shipping)… Just feels a little disrespectful.
Back when I was a kid my parents bought the game Masterpiece for us one Christmas. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/1501/masterpiece
We played it many times and always had a great time. But someone bent the most valuable ($1,000,000?) money card. From there on out it was obvious to all who had that card in their hand. It made the game unplayable.
I still remember that now. It’s one of the reasons I sleeve my cards.
I’m concerned with Spirit Island too. I backed it, but I don’t know if I’ll like it. It’s a situation where I’d rather be in than out because I don’t like me some Spirit Island. I agree with the extra tokens adding more to a game that doesn’t seem like it needs more on the board. I was under the impression that Dahan were going to be the focus of an expansion, but this doesn’t seem it?
Correct, that’s projected to be the next expansion after this one.