Cover Your Assets

Cover Your Assets is an Editor’s Top Pick and the most cheerfully mean twenty dollars you can spend on a card game. You stack up sets of matching assets, somebody steals the top one off your pile, and a little later you take it back and the table turns on whoever helped them do it. It earns 5/5 Bamboo and 5/5 Pandas from us, which almost nothing does. Everything we have written about it lives here.

New to it, or in the middle of an argument about it? The review explains who it is for, and the five rules everyone gets wrong settles the usual fights straight from the rulebook, including whether your first set can be stolen and whether two wilds make a set.

For playing it better, the strategy guide covers hand management, wild discipline, and the discard habit that costs people rounds without their ever noticing. If it is mostly two of you, Cover Your Assets with two players matters more than you would expect, because the draft piles replace the discard economy and it becomes a different game. And Assets vs Kingdom vs Cookies makes the case that you probably only need one of them.