HOW TO PLAY Cover Your assets

LEARN HOW TO PLAY cover your assets (VIDEO TRANSCRIPT)

INTRO

Let’s get ready to Cover your Assets!

Cover Your Assets is a fast-paced and addictive family card game. You’ll collect interesting and valuable assets and protect them from folks who want to attempt to steal them! 

OVERVIEW

Cover Your Assets is played over a number of rounds until one player amasses a fortune of over one million dollars in assets.

SETUP

To get started, pick a player to be the dealer and set aside the Swap, Move, and Penny Jar cards, these are for the advanced rules!

The dealer shuffles the deck and deals 5 cards to each player.

The dealer flips a card to start the discard pile and the player left of them goes first.

ON YOUR TURN

On your turn, you must take ONE of three actions:

• Form a set

• Discard

• Challenge

If you want to form a set, you’ll need a pair of matching assets, or any asset and a wild silver or gold card. 

Usually these cards come from your hand, but you can also make a pair with a card from your hand and the top card of the discard pile.

After you form a set, stack it in alternating orientation. Horizontal stack, then vertical stack, then horizontal, and so on.

To discard, simply discard a card from your hand face up onto the discard pile.

Finally, you can challenge, but really, you are attempting to steal.

Every players’ first set of assets is always safe, no matter what. But, every other players’ top set in their asset stack, after their first set, is vulnerable to being stolen! You must make your own first set before you attempt to steal.

If you want to challenge, play a matching asset from your hand, or a wild card, in front of the player you want to challenge.

The defending player may either give up their set or respond by playing their own matching asset or wild card.

If this happens, you must either respond AGAIN with a matching asset or wild card, and so on.

When one player either can’t or chooses not to respond to the challenge they lose.

If the challenger wins, they take the set. If the defender wins, they keep it. 

In either case, that set has become MUCH more valuable, as all of those challenge cards are now added to the set.

END OF YOUR TURN

After you take an action, draw back up to five cards. If you were involved in a challenge, make sure you draw back up to five too!

Play proceeds clockwise.

END OF ROUND

When the deck is emptied, play continues until all players have played all of their cards.

You can’t pass, so if you can’t play anything, you MUST discard.

SCORING

At the end of the round, players tally their scores by adding up the value of all cards in their stack.

Here's a tip from Grandpa Beck to make counting easier! Start with the higher cards and form sets of $100,000 instead of just adding up the cards randomly.

GAME END

There’s a few ways to end Cover Your Assets, as shown in the instructions. 

The classic way to finish is to continue playing rounds until one player passes $1,000,000! OR, you can just play one round, it’s up to you!

CLOSING

After you’ve gotten a handle of the basic rules, you can add advanced rules and cards to your game.

Remember those cards we discarded at the beginning of the video?

The penny jar is a wild worth $1000. It makes sets as normal, but when challenging, it counts as two wild cards. If you want to counter a penny jar, you’ll need to play two cards, or another penny jar.

The swap card swaps the top set on your asset stack with another player’s top set.

The move card moves the top set on your, or any other player’s asset stack to the bottom of that stack.

After playing a swap or move card, remove it from the game.

Starting on page 10 of the instructions, there are plenty of other exciting rules and variants you can add to bring more depth and strategy to your game to bring years of fun to your family game nights.

Thanks for watching! Remember you can always call or text Grandpa Beck if you have any questions. 

Don’t forget to cover your assets!