Cover Your Assets Card Game: Rules for How to Play

Setup

Shuffle all of the cards together.
Deal four cards face down to each player. If there are only two players you will deal five cards to each player. You can look at your own cards, but you shouldn’t show them to the other players.
Place the rest of the cards face down in the middle of the table to form the draw pile.
Flip over the top card of the draw pile to form the discard pile.
The player to the left of the dealer starts the game. Play will continue clockwise for the rest of the game.

Playing the Game

On your turn you can choose one of four actions:

Play a pair of cards.
Match the top card from the discard pile.
Attempt to steal cards from another player.
Discard a card.

Playing A Pair of Cards

If you have two cards in your hand of the same type, you can choose to lay them down as a pair. Only two cards can be played to create each pair. Each turn You can only play one pair of cards from your hand.

You can use one wild card (gold or silver card) to create a pair. You cannot make a pair of wild cards.

Play a pair using a wild — This player had a stocks card in their hand along with a silver card. The silver is wild so it can be used to create a pair with the stocks card.

Place your first pair of cards in front of you. Each future pair of cards that you add to your collection will be played on top of your previous pairs in a crisscross fashion.

Adding cards to collection — After creating the stocks pair, the player adds it to their collection. Since they already have a pair in their collection, they will turn the stocks pair the opposite direction.

Matching the Discard Pile

If you have a card that matches the top card on the discard pile, you can combine that card with the card from the discard pile to form a pair. You can also combine a gold/silver card with the top card from the discard pile. This pair will be immediately added to your pile of assets.

Stealing From the Other Players

On your turn you have the option to try to steal the top pair of assets that are in front of one of the other players. To be able to steal from another player, the following conditions have to be met.

You have to have at least one pair of assets in front of yourself.
The player you are trying to steal from must have at least two pairs of assets in front of them.
You must have a card that matches the set of cards that you want to steal. You can only steal the top set of cards from another player’s pile. Gold and silver cards can be used to match the set you want to steal.

If you meet the requirements to potentially steal a set of cards from another player and you want to attempt to steal them, you will play the matching card.

One of the players has bank account cards on the top of their collection. The current player has their own bank account card, so they decide to play it to try and steal the bank account cards from the other player.

The player you are trying to steal from then has the opportunity to defend. To defend they must play a card that matches the asset, or they could play a wild card (gold or silver).

Defend against an attack — The player decides to defend their bank account cards by playing their own bank account card.

Players keep alternating playing matching cards/wilds until one player either doesn’t have a matching card to play or chooses not to keep playing cards. The player who played the last card adds the set of cards to their collection. All cards that were used to steal and defend are added to the set. The set of assets will now have three or more cards in it.

Results of an attempted steal — After the player defended their bank account cards, the current player plays a silver card to continue their steal attempt. The defender plays their own gold card to defend. Since the defender played the last card, they get to keep their bank account cards. They also get to add the two bank account, silver, and gold cards played during the steal attempt to their set of cards.

Discard A Card

If you can’t take one of the other actions or don’t want to, you must choose one card from your hand to discard. You will place the card face up on top of the discard pile.

End of Turn

At the end of your turn you will take cards from the draw pile. The current player draws enough cards to replenish their hand to the starting size. For two player games, the player will draw cards until they have five cards in their hand. If there are three or more players, the players will draw cards until they have four cards in their hand.

If the player attempted to steal assets on their turn, the current player will draw cards first followed by the player they tried to steal from.

After the player(s) have replenished their hand(s), play passes to the next player clockwise.

End of Round

The round ends when all of the cards have been drawn from the draw pile. The players will continue playing until the players have discarded/played all of the cards remaining in their hands.

Players will then tally their score for the round. Each player will count up the value of all of the cards in their asset pile. This is their score for the current round. If none of the players have accumulated enough money to win the game, you will play another round.

Scoring in Cover Your Assets — During the round one of the players acquired these cards. They earned $225,000 this round.

Winning Cover Your Assets

At the end of each round you should check to see if any player has earned at least $1 million in the game. If any player has acquired $1 million, the game ends. The player that acquired assets totaling $1 million wins the game. If two players or more players accumulate at least $1 million at the end of the same round, the player who acquired more money wins the game.

Components

4 Gold Cards
8 Silver Cards
8 Home Cards
10 Jewels Cards
10 Classic Auto Cards
10 Bank Account Cards
10 Coin Collection Cards
10 Stocks Cards
10 Baseball Cards
10 Cash Under Mattress Cards
10 Stamp Collection Cards
10 Piggy Bank Cards
Instructions

Year: 2011 | Publisher: Grandpa Beck’s Games | Designer: Brent Beck, Jeffrey Beck | Artist: David Bock, Andrew Bosley, Anne Pätzke, Apryl Stott

Genres: Card, Family, Set Collection, Take That

Ages: 7+ | Number of Players: 2-6 | Length of Game: 20-40 minutes

Difficulty: Light | Strategy: Light | Luck: High

For more board and card game rules/how to plays, check out our complete alphabetical list of card and board game rules posts.

Written By:

Eric Mortensen

Eric Mortensen is an owner and head writer on Geeky Hobbies since 2014. He is an avid board game player and collector with over 3,000 board and card games in his collection. Since 2014 he has written more than 1,100 board game how to play guides.