Another of the games we brought back from Spiel Essen 2023, StatYou is a new party game from Cinnamon Games. It's designed by Hurby and Lisa Donkers for 3-12 players, and the art is by Jeanine Donkers.
The game comes with a board that's primarily an oversized scoring track. It's double sided to allow for double length games (ie: first to 24 points rather than 12) but we suspect most people will stick with the 12-point target. There's a deck of 43 double-sided purple (noun) cards and another of 43 yellow (verb/adjective) cards. You place out three yellow cards above the board in positions A, B and C, and three purple cards below the board in positions 1, 2 and 3. Each turn, one player takes on the role of the 'Sculptor' and another as the 'Statue'. The Sculptor draws an 'Assignment Card' that indicates to them alone the card combination they need to communicate to the other players. They then pose the Statue to represent that combo. The other players, and the Statue themselves, then guess at the two words conveyed. Players each get a point for each correct word and the Sculptor gets a point for each word that at least one player got right: so each player, Sculptor, Statue and guessers can score a maximum of two points each turn.
StatYou makes for an entertaining alternative to Charades. As regards the Sculptor and Statue, it's a game that's quite literally hands on, but with that caveat it's a game that all the family can join in with. And if you play on the 12-point board, games are likely to run to around 6-8 turns - so around 30 minutes, which we found to be just about the right length for the game.
You can step up the difficulty by requiring the Sculptor to use two yellow (verb/adjective) words, and if you play with these rules players score minus points for wrong answers. StatYou is a versatile package and it offers other variants you can try too, but in our Board's Eye View plays we didn't find these worked quite as well, not least because they included options that were more difficult to stage. For example, the rules suggest a variant where a player takes on the role of 'Critic' - also looking at the Assignment Card, and then posing themselves as a Statue in view of the Sculptor but out of sight of the other players. The Sculptor has to pose their Statue without making use of any of the elements depicted by the Critic. Tho' this variant certainly ramps up the difficulty level, we found it cumbersome to organise things so that the Critic could only be seen by the Sculptor and it could also give rise to arguments over whether or not the Sculptor's depiction was wholly original. Better then to stick to StatYou's basic rules, which make for a much easier-to-stage and reliably entertaining party game.
And if you are playing StatYou as an adult game, perhaps after a few drinks, then you might be tempted to add in the aptly named Rude Deck: an expansion that offers another 18 double-sided yellow cards and 9 double-sided purple cards with mostly risqué or scatalogical connotations. This deck is assuredly NSFW (Not Safe For Work) but will appeal to those looking for a more raucous game.