Quandary is a brilliant little game, and those components are top notch.

It's great for playing with kids and they usually love to use their math skills to find out the winner. Sure would be nice if I could win a game or two!

As is typical of Knizia's scoring systems, there's a nice calculating system similar to Lost Cities.

Comes in a nice big box and feels really good to play too.

Quandary is based around collecting stones of different colors. There are five colors and five tracks representing those colors. At the beginning of a round players draw a certain amount of tiles (depends on how many are playing). Each tile is of one of the five colors and has a number from 0-5 on it. Each turn a player has to play one of his tiles down and then draw a colored stone. As soon as one of the colored tracks is filled the round ends and everyone scores points based on what color stones they have and the last point value on that color's track. Confused? Here's an example. Let's say the round is done and you have 3 green stones and 2 white ones. If the last green tile played were a 5 and the last white one were a 3, you would have 21 points.

Strategy and bluffing are key to this game. If you have for example the red 5 tile, do you immediately start grabbing red stones and make it obvious that's what you are going for, or do you grab other colors to fool your opponents? Also when to play what color is important too because it might cause a track to fill early in the round ending scoring too soon, before you get your high value tiles down.

I've played this game a few times with 3 people but mostly with 4 and it seems to be more fun with 4.

This is my first review, so I just want to conclude with my assurance that even though I might not have described it well Quandary is a game well worth owning.

Quandary is the deluxe version of Dr. Knizia's 'Flinke Pinke.' The original game is a very nice little game with practically no theme at all, although one could possibly construe it to be a stock market game in the very broadest sense. The original game is played with cards and a few colored chips, and this works quite well.

Enter Quandary. This is lavish production, with a large board and nice racks to hold the thick plastic tiles that have replaced the cards. This is one class act. It is also completely unnecessary. Since the game worked just as well without the fancy components, it stands to reason that it really does not need them. They are nice, but they also send the cost of the game sky high.

If the game were somewhat heavier in nature, it might warrant the deluxe components, but it is still a rather light game. As it is, it is a bit of a fish out of water. The game itself is good, but not great. The components are truly extraordinary.

Recommended, if you have the dollars to blow!