Amass Millions in Cover Your A$$ets

How would you like to become a millionaire in under 30 minutes?

Well, at the rate you can stack up assets in Cover Your Assets by Grandpa Beck’s Games, you’ll have a great chance of getting to a million in no time.

Of course, those around you may be a bit jealous and will look to swipe some of those assets out from under you in their own rush to get to $1,000,000.

It all comes down to how you play your cards.

It’s time to dive into this fast and fun card game of asset acquisition!

 

How to play Cover Your Assets

The goal of the game is to be the first player to reach $1,000,000 over the course of a few rounds by collecting stacks of matching asset cards of varying values.

To begin, players shuffle all 110 asset cards together and deal 4 cards to each player.

On a player’s turn, they must take 1 of 4 possible actions.

1. Make a pair from their hand: Place one pair of asset cards from their hand to their personal asset card pile in front of them. A pair is either 2 identical cards or an asset card with a wild card tucked behind it. Each time a new pair is placed down, it’s stacked perpendicular to the previous asset cards in their personal pile. Even if a player has 3 cards of the same kind, they may only play 2 cards to make an asset pair.
2. Make a pair from the discard pile: If the top card in the discard pile matches a card in their hand, the player may take the top card and make a pair with the card from their hand. They likewise place this as an asset pair perpendicular on their growing pile of assets.
3. Attempt to steal assets from another player: To steal from another player, the active player must show an asset card from their hand that matches the top asset on an opponent’s pile. The challenged player may defend their assets by showing either a matching card or a wild from their hand. The active player may likewise counter that by showing another card of the matching type or wild. This continues until one of the competing players can’t match. The winning player gets the contested assets plus all cards used in the battle.
4. Discard and draw: If a player can’t or doesn’t want to do any of the above actions, they must discard a card from their hand to the discard pile and then draw a new card from the draw pile.

At the end of a player’s turn, all players draw back up to the number of cards they started with.

Once the draw pile is empty, players continue taking turns until everyone has played all cards from their hands.

After the last card is played, players total up the value of all cards in their asset pile and add that to their score from prior rounds. If a player has reached $1,000,000, the game ends. If no one has reached that goal yet, players play another round.

Once a player surpasses $1,000,000, they are crowned the winner. If more than one player hits that mark at the end of a round, the player with the highest total wins.

 

Can the whole family enjoy playing Cover Your Assets?

Cover Your Assets is a light card game that most everyone in the family can enjoy playing. The recommended age is 8+ and we think that’s a fair assessment.

When I first heard the title of the game, I was skeptical. Mainly because any time I’d heard the term CYA (without the “ets”) it was in a derogatory manner. So my first thoughts about the game weren’t nice. I thought the game must be trying to be edgy – which held no appeal to me.

But then I heard my wife talking about how much fun the girls in our neighborhood had playing Cover Your Assets at girls camp last summer. And my wife added that she really enjoyed it too.

Well, her liking a game means a lot in my book. So, when Grandpa Beck’s Games gave us a chance to review Cover Your Assets, I was happily on board to give it a try.

And it’s been a hit with our whole family!

We love games that are easy to learn, simple to remember, quick to play, and deliver fun times.

And that includes stealing cards from each other!

We first played Cover Your Assets as a whole family over our Christmas vacation. It was a full 6-player game and there were lots of attempts to steal assets from each others’ piles. It wasn’t always successful, but it was totally worth attempting.

With only 4 cards in hand, it can be tricky knowing when to try to bury valuable wild cards in our assets stacks or when to hold on to them for defending against attacks.

We like that players can only attempt to steal assets at the top of other piles. But the perpendicular stacking of assets means we’re also eyeing each others’ assets below — in case they soon get freed up by the assets above them being taken.

There’s also a good variety of asset types in the game. Four of the asset types are valued at $5,000. Three of the asset types are valued at $10,000. Two asset types are valued at $15,000. Leaving the final asset type valued at $20,000. The wild cards come with values of $25,000 for Silver and $50,000 for Gold.

So when you can hide and bury those high-value Gold and Silver cards lower in your pile, you’re doing well. But when you lose one in a challenge, you’re going to feel it. (But in a fun way, of course.)

While kids younger than 8 would be able to make matching pairs of cards in their hand and find matches among other players’ assets, they’re not going to like being stolen from. The “take that” nature of the game — even though it’s light — probably won’t go over well with them.

Overall, Cover Your Assets is a light, fun card game that we highly recommend!

 

How does Cover Your Assets score on our “Let’s Play Again” game meter?

This may go without saying, but Cover Your Assets scores very high on our “let’s play again” game meter.

Since every gets assets stolen from them during the game, there’s plenty of post-game chatter about how everything turned out. And that post-game chatter is another tell-tale sign that we’ve had a great time playing a game. And it usually prompts a few calls for “let’s play again”.

The compact nature of Cover Your Assets also means it’s easy to take with us. That’s why our first play was over our Christmas vacation — it’s so easy to pack and can be played almost anywhere.

We’d like to thank Grandpa Beck’s Games for a review copy of Cover Your Assets.