The Resistance and The Resistance: Avalon share a designer, Don Eskridge, a publisher, Indie Boards and Cards, and a core premise of hidden spies working against a team that doesn't know who to trust.
Both games are explicitly marketed as standalone products that remain compatible and combinable, which understandably leads buyers to assume one sleeve purchase covers both collections at once.
That assumption doesn't hold up once you check the actual card dimensions. These two closely related, officially compatible games use two genuinely different card sizes.
Here's the real breakdown for each, confirmed independently, and the honest two-sleeve answer this pairing actually needs.
The base game of The Resistance ships 20 cards in its core box, covering character and leader roles, sized at 63.5mm by 88mm, the standard poker dimension. This figure is confirmed through sleeveyourgames.com's independent sleeve-fit database for the Third Edition.
Most of The Resistance's actual gameplay runs through non-card components, voting tokens and mission markers rather than a large card deck, which keeps the card count modest compared to many other titles in this cluster.
The Resistance: Avalon's base game ships 26 cards at a noticeably narrower 57mm by 89mm, confirmed on the same independent sleeve database. That's a genuinely different width than the base Resistance game's 63.5mm cards, not a rounding difference.
Avalon's own expansion content, including the Lady of the Lake material, introduces a second, smaller card size around 41mm by 63mm for roughly 50 additional cards, a mini format that doesn't match either of the two sizes above.
Because both games are sold as compatible and often displayed side by side at retail, it's a reasonable but wrong assumption that one sleeve pack handles both collections at once.
A buyer who sleeves Avalon's cards in a standard poker-width sleeve built for the base Resistance game ends up with the same slack problem documented for several other narrow-card games already covered on this site.
EVORETRO's Matte Card Sleeves Standard Size fits The Resistance's 63.5mm by 88mm cards comfortably, since this one genuinely lands in standard poker dimensions without any narrower-width complication.
At just 20 cards, this is one of the smallest decks in this project's entire sleeve coverage, making a single pack more than enough with plenty left over.
EVORETRO's Perfect Fit Sleeves Inner Card Protector gives Avalon's narrower 57mm cards a closer hold than a loose standard sleeve, the same practical answer already used elsewhere in this cluster for bridge-width cards.
Avalon's smaller 41mm expansion cards from the Lady of the Lake content still don't have a clean sleeve match in EVORETRO's current lineup, which is worth knowing honestly rather than forcing an imperfect claim.
A collector who owns both The Resistance and Avalon, and plays them combined as the games are designed to allow, ends up juggling three distinct card sizes across one shelf rather than one uniform deck.
Labeling each sleeved group clearly by size, rather than by game name alone, avoids the mix-up that comes from two visually similar card backs sitting in unmarked boxes next to each other.
Character and loyalty cards in both games get picked up, viewed privately, and set back down repeatedly across a single session, while vote and mission cards tend to see comparatively lighter, more public handling at the table.
That uneven wear pattern makes the character and loyalty cards the higher sleeving priority in both The Resistance and Avalon, even though the full deck in each game is still small enough to sleeve completely without much added cost.
Both The Resistance and The Resistance: Avalon support 5 to 10 players directly out of the base box, with enough character and role cards already included to scale across that full range without buying anything extra.
That built-in scaling is part of why each base game's card count stays modest, 20 for The Resistance and 26 for Avalon, compared to deck-heavy games elsewhere in this cluster. Most of the real player-count flexibility lives in non-card components rather than a bigger deck.
No, The Resistance uses 63.5mm by 88mm cards and Avalon uses narrower 57mm by 89mm cards.
20 cards, since most gameplay runs through non-card components.
26 cards, plus roughly 50 smaller cards if the Lady of the Lake expansion is included.
It fits loosely; Perfect Fit Sleeves give a closer hold on the narrower width.
Start with EVORETRO's Matte Card Sleeves Standard Size for the base Resistance game, then switch to Perfect Fit Sleeves for Avalon's narrower deck.
See our Bluffing and Social Deduction Card Games guide for a different corner of the hidden-role shelf, our Starting Card-Based Board Games buying guide for newcomers comparing formats, and the Board Game Card Sleeve Buying Guide for general sizing theory.
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