Seen mention of Card sleeves to protect everything, are they worth it?

I am in the UK so is there anywhere that sells a set(s) that covers Imperial Assault?

Cheers

Sleeves are a huge investment, it depends on how often you handle the cards and how much you want to protect them. Currently Imperial Assault is the only game I have sleeves for and it's partly because I play it more than any of my other games, and partly so that I can print out errata and slip it into the sleeves.

I used to not bother with sleeves. In the campaign the cards are not handled that much because they are not kept in your hand. In skirmish you would only need to sleeve the 30 command cards, and optionally your 5-8 deployment cards.

I have sleeved the deployment cards that have errata. Whenever I need to proxy cards I sleeve also the other cards. The agenda deck is just 18 cards. The supply and item decks are also easier to shuffle when sleeved.

So, practically you only need one pack of Medium (Standard American, 57x89mm) and Mini (41x63mm) sleeves. I used Arcane Tinmen sleeves.

The color codes for FFG sleeves are included in the product pages.

I've bought sleeves for most of my stuff. If you don't need color-coded factions, it's pretty cheap to set up your stuff in sleeves. I put the command cards in sleeves for sure just because they are small and easily bent and get handled more.

It's only a huge investment if you buy special or printed sleeves with fancy artwork. I've bought sleeves that were clearanced or pretty cheap for $3 for 50 of them. You'll find that you only use a certain set of command cards (5-10 base cards and then another 5-10 depending on your list Smugglers or Hunters or Troopers or creatures, etc) so you probably only will use 50-75 of your command cards if you have every expansion. So there are 50% of your command cards that you will probably never touch or only use once unfortunately. the little sleeves are $3 for 50 as well. If you were going with the bare minimum you could sleeve almost everything you'd ever use for $15-20usd.

I have 2 boys, ages 3 and 5, so card sleeves are a must. But even if I didn't have kids, I'd buy card sleeves to protect the cards I use the most.

I can get a pack of 50 at my FLGS for $2.50. I look at it like insurance for my purchase. The core is $100 MSRP, and they recommend 7 card sleeve packs, which would run you a little less than$20 (when you include tax). And if you're only going to sleeve the cards that you're using, you could get away with 3 or 4 packs. So you can insure some of the most important aspects of your game for 10%-20%, not a bad investment.

Plus, like had been stated before, there are several cards that have been changed through errata. Having sleeves makes it pretty seamless to just print out the updated versions and slip them in over the originals. If your entire set is sleeved, I doubt anyone would even notice the difference. My gaming group has yet to say "hey, these have been printed out and are covering the originals".

As others have said-

There's very little shuffling and handling of cards when compared to a game where sleeves are necessary (such as MTG). I started sleeving mine, as I had a lot of extra sleeve packs, but realized it was kind of pointless.

Everyone's different, though. If you're like thestag, for instance, and have kids, sleeves might be important.

Sleeves are a life saver if someone accidentally spills a drink on the play area which has happened to me on several occasions!

1 hour ago, Boomer_J said:

Sleeves are a life saver if someone accidentally spills a drink on the play area which has happened to me on several occasions!

For the amount of times that we've been absolutely wasted during out campaigns (seriously, I had to have my rebels describe the last few turns of the finale in our last campaign, as I legitimately didn't even remember who won the next morning- still, played within the rules somehow) that has never happened. Fingers crossed for that to always be the case.

4 hours ago, buckero0 said:

I've bought sleeves for most of my stuff. If you don't need color-coded factions, it's pretty cheap to set up your stuff in sleeves. I put the command cards in sleeves for sure just because they are small and easily bent and get handled more.

It's only a huge investment if you buy special or printed sleeves with fancy artwork. I've bought sleeves that were clearanced or pretty cheap for $3 for 50 of them. You'll find that you only use a certain set of command cards (5-10 base cards and then another 5-10 depending on your list Smugglers or Hunters or Troopers or creatures, etc) so you probably only will use 50-75 of your command cards if you have every expansion. So there are 50% of your command cards that you will probably never touch or only use once unfortunately. the little sleeves are $3 for 50 as well. If you were going with the bare minimum you could sleeve almost everything you'd ever use for $15-20usd.

Enough sleeves for Imperial Assault and its expansions (excluding the Skirmish mission cards) using standard FFG sleeves came to over half the price as the core game, thats a huge investment for me. I've already found my character cards stuck together because of soda drink misting, so I'm looking into getting those laminated next.

If you don't want to spend a ton of money, you could at least get sleeves for the command cards. Everything else shouldn't be a big deal.

Offbrand sleeves work just as well and may cost a little less or may be easier to find.

I've played over 100 games without sleeves and the cards are still pretty much perfect. A few of the board tiles are starting to get a bit dinged up though. It might be worth spraying the tiles with a sealer to protect them a bit.

I have all my IA card stuff sleeved, even though there's lots of material there that I don't use in any real frequency. Then I have everything in card pages inside one of those binders that zip up, so nothing spills out and they don't get dusty or anything. Probably overkill, but IA is my favorite game.

23 hours ago, neosmagus said:

Enough sleeves for Imperial Assault and its expansions (excluding the Skirmish mission cards) using standard FFG sleeves came to over half the price as the core game, thats a huge investment for me. I've already found my character cards stuck together because of soda drink misting, so I'm looking into getting those laminated next.

Maybe sleeves are more expensive where you live, I was just pointing out that sleeves are a great way to protect your cards. I've got the equivalent of 2 of every thing. I have spent that much on sleeves. I splurged a little to buy a color for each faction. Ive got way more command cards than I can ever use ( 3 core and 3 Hoth sets) but I still haven't spent $50 on sleeves. I even bought a nice card binder at Walmart for $5 and sheets to hold my cards. I also realized that it's nice to have one of everything sleeved, but there's only some duplicates you need sleeved. There's probably about 25-30 cards I use 85% of the time, maybe more and the rest rotate.

On 3/2/2017 at 11:52 AM, Union said:

I've played over 100 games without sleeves and the cards are still pretty much perfect. A few of the board tiles are starting to get a bit dinged up though. It might be worth spraying the tiles with a sealer to protect them a bit.

This is a good idea, I've had to sharpie the outside edges of my tiles because of whitening from gradual wear and tear in the box/baggies