Cover Your Assets

I am interested not just in board games, but also the makers of board games.  You never know what will be in these little boxes.  For Cover You Assets, there was a leaflet talking about the mom-an-pop game company and their family.  Check out Grandpa Beck's Games for more about them, their games, and their fun videos.  Looks like a fun bunch.

Cover Your Assets is a fairly simple card-matching game.  It is meant for 3-6 players but has a big 2-player variation starting on page 12 that works very nicely.  So that is what I will describe here.

The cards represent various assets with prices, like Comic Books, Jewels, a Piggy Bank, and so on.  There are also gold and silver cards which act as wild cards and have the highest card values ($50K and $25K).  In the 2-player game each player gets a hand of 6 cards and there are 3 stacks of 10 dealt out with top card showing (the Draft Piles).

Now, each turn you can either (1) make a set from your hand, (2) draft a set from your hand plus a top card from a draft pile, (3) challenge to steal someone else's match or (4) discard one card.  A set starts as simply a pair of matching cards or a card plus wild card.  If it comes from your hand, you get to keep it.  If either card came from a draft pile, an opponent can immediately challenge it.  Either challenge moves works the same way: you throw down a matching card or wild, they can defend with a matching card or wild, and whoever plays the last card in this series wins the set.

Your last set is vulnerable and can be challenged (stolen) but as soon as you play a new set, the previous set goes into your safe pile.  That's not exactly how the rules worded it: they said to keep all your sets in one pile, neatly alternating directions from one set to the next.  But the pile just naturally gets messy so we learned to keep the last set out of the pile until we knew it was safe.

It's a fair amount of fun, and after 3 or 4 hands we started to see some bits of strategy.  Like only playing some of your cards in a challenge to let the opponent think they won, then throw another card or two at it on your next turn after they probably used up all their defenses.

Adding up all the cards at the end of a 2-player game is a bit of a pain in the butt.  We naturally sorted by face value and started counting out stacks of 100.  I had a huge challenge win in the second game where I think I got six $15K cards with two golds and two silver for $240K total.

I'm sure we'll try this one again, and maybe try a few more moves.  It doesn't feel like there is a lot of real decisions to be made, just when to challenge or not, but it has a good energy level.