Quandary

Quandary is a 1970 uncredited game, published at Spear's Games.

The game is played on a 12x12 multi-colored board:

Each player has four pieces that must be placed in his first row. The game comes with 12 numbered cards (1 to 12) that must be shuffled for each player that draws four of them that determines the piece's initial position.

Rules:

• On his turn, the player moves a friendly stone forward (vertically or diagonally) to an empty square
• However, the move is only valid if the square the player moves into is of the same color to any one of the four squares directly in front of an enemy piece (it does not matter if those squares are occupied or not)
• If there are no valid moves, the player passes
• Wins the player that moves one friendly piece to his last row

Here are the original rules:

I don't see how the use of cards is necessary for the game to work properly, besides forcing matches to start in different initial positions. We could replace the random mechanism by initially making players drop one piece per turn in their first rows.

Making the moves dependent on the board position, and especially of the adversary, hurts clarity a lot. Not sure how it is possible to plan more than one move ahead.

A comment by Clark Rodeffer:

Quandary can sometimes (always?) be played to a stalemate if one or both players intentionally limit color choices. The problem stems from the layout of the colored squares -- the closest any two squares of the same color are on the standard board is a knight's move apart. As a result, moving into colored squares that block your opponent's choices is relatively easy, leading to many mutually blocked games. The game can probably be fixed by making the movement of the pawns a knight's move (with four potential target squares) instead of the current forward one orthogonal or diagonal step (only three potential target squares), but I have yet to try this variant.

Quandary appeared on Jeux et Stratègie #47:

And in Games & Puzzles #15: