Spent some time with Grandpa Beck and the two card games his company publishes - Golf and Cover Your Assets. Played Cover Your Assets with Grandpa (Brent) and Tauni Beck right there at their Toy Fair booth earlier this month, which says a lot. It means simple rules, easily discernible goals, and a relatively short playing time.
Both games are family-oriented, capable of being grasped by your average 8-year-old, while, at the same time, offering challenges to adults. It's a fairly level playing field for both games, in that the processes don't entail any deep-level strategy options, though adults will obviously apply higher levels of thinking to both games.
Of the two, I preferred Cover Your Assets, primarily because it entails a high degree of player interaction. Golf is much more of a solo exercise performed by a group.
There are 110 cards in the Cover Your Asset deck, divided among 12 assets, each with a money value, ranging from $50K (gold) to $5K (baseball cards, cash under mattress, stamp collection, and piggy bank; obviously, the game does not take into account the higher end of a serious philatelist's stamp collection). The object of the game is to be the player with the highest asset value at the end of the game.
This is accomplished by playing matching sets of two cards in front of you, each of which will be used to tally your asset score at game end. Gold ($50K) and Silver ($25K) assets are wild cards and can be used in combination with any other asset to make a pair.
You are dealt four cards at the start, and on your turn, you may play a pair of assets from your hand in front of you (if possible, you can use a card visible in the discard pile to create such a pair), attempt to steal an opponent's assets, or discard a card from your hand and replace it with one from the draw pile. Successive asset pairs are placed atop previously played pairs in a perpendicular fashion. Only assets on the top of an opponent's display can be stolen.
Your attempt to steal an opponent's top asset pair begins by showing said opponent an asset card that matches that player's top asset cards. The opponent may counter this steal attempt by revealing from his hand an asset card that is either a wild card (gold or silver) or a match to the pair. You may then try to counter that move with another wild card or card matching the pair. This will go on (generally for not very long) until someone can't counter a move and the winner gains the assets. All cards used in the 'steal' process go into the top pile of assets. It's a good idea to cover the more important assets as quickly as possible to avoid their theft; Homes, Jewels and Classic Autos ($15K), for example.
This will continue until the draw deck is exhausted and all players have either played or discarded cards from their hand. Pick up your personal pile of collected assets, and add 'em all up. Rounds are repeated until one player has amassed over $1 million in assets. If two players do so, highest score wins.
There's a lot of 'gotcha' in this game, which is a good part of its charm. It was easy to figure out that Grandpa Beck and his spouse, Tauni, had played this game a lot. The way they timed their theft attempts, used wild cards to their advantage, and on occasion, held on to asset pairs as defensive mechanisms against theft all worked to their advantage. Grandpa won our three-player game, but I slipped into second place, which also says a lot.
Golf is more or less ruled by the luck-of-the-draw phenomenon. There are 108 cards, with values ranging from -4 to 11; 72 of them (12 each) embrace the range from 3 to 8. The object of the game is to be (like golf itself) the player with the lowest score. This is accomplished by use of a 3 X 3 grid of cards (a starting hand), which are placed initially, face down, in front of each player. The cards that remain after the deal are placed in a draw pile, and a single card is turned over to begin a discard pile. Two of the cards (your choice) in the 3 X 3, face down grid are turned up to begin the game. On your turn, you may select a card from either the draw pile or the discard pile and use it to replace a card (face up or down, your choice) in your grid. As you continue this process, more and more cards in the grid will be turned face up, and the game ends when all of them are face up. At this point, remaining players each get one more turn. You then tally the value of the nine cards in your completely face up grid and the player with the lowest score wins.
The crux of the decision-making process of this game is embodied in whether the card drawn from the draw pile or discard pile is valuable or not in terms of attaining the lowest score . You can choose to discard a card drawn from the draw pile, but must play (substitute for card in your grid) a card selected from the discard pile. In the early stages of the game, this will be hard to determine, because a majority of the cards in your 3 X 3 grid are face down. Simple enough to figure out that the -3 you just picked up can be used to replace the face up "9" in your grid, but what happens when your two face up cards are -3 and -4 and you keep picking up positive value cards from the deck?
In order to get more cards turned up, which, in turn, will offer you more options as the game progresses, you'll need to take some risks. Again, simple enough, when you've drawn a minus- or low-value card. You figure that one of the face down cards is going to be of higher value. Occasionally, though, you'll take a risk that doesn't work out for you; decide to replace a face down card in the grid with a "3" that you've drawn and discover that the card you're replacing is a -4 (designated as a "Hole-In-One").
There is, too, a rule that allows for the removal of a set of three cards from your grid. Any three cards of equal value that appear on the grid in a straight horizontal, vertical and/or diagonal line are removed from play and not considered in the final scoring. Easier said than done, especially when your player numbers start approaching the maximum of six. You're only going to be able to do this once, because when any row or column is removed from the grid, there are no longer any three-in-a-row possibilities.
Whimsical art work on each of the cards, and titles for them add to the pure luck enjoyment of this game; see the confused guy in a safari helmet, poking his head through tall grass in the "Lost Ball" card worth the maximum 11 points, or the blonde lady in pink, polka dot shorts leaping into the air on the "Hole-in-One" card.
They're both worthy additions to any family game shelf, and worth a try with almost any gaming group as one of those 'warm-up' games before settling in to the complex stuff.
Golf and Cover Your Assets are published by Grandpa Beck's Games, out of Seattle, WA. Both are playable with 2-5 players. Cover Your Assets accommodates six. Age range for both is 8 & up. They retail on the company Web site - www.grandpabeckgames.com - for $11.99
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