UFO – Wyrmlog

Battery Bear Hustle: Instructions for Play

It’s 1972 and your bears have been making a killing selling illegal car batteries. But now the IRS is on your case! Your only option is to evacuate the parking structure and fly away, but can you get enough bears to your UFO before President Nixon catches you?

SETUP
1: Place your bears at the top of the parking structure.
2: Place the IRS agents on their Vans
3: Randomly distribute the Skateboards, Flamethrowers and Peerages by rolling two dice for each, and placing them on the corresponding parking space
4: Place President Nixon and the Lame Duck beside the board
5: Each player rolls a dice. The highest roll goes first

RULES
1: Each turn you may move your bears up to five places within the parking structure. You may move one bear five spaces, five bears one space, or any combination between.
2: Two bears may not occupy the same space without Fighting
3: You may not fight your own bears
4: A bear may move through another bear as long as the owner of the bear allows it. Otherwise a fight starts
5: When bears fight, each player rolls a die. The highest die roll wins the fight. In a draw, the attacking bear wins.
6: The losing bear is sent back to the top of the parking structure.
7: If a bear enters a space with a Skateboard, Flamethrower or Peerage they take the item and their movement ends.
8: A bear with a flamethrower rolls 2 dice when fighting
9: A bear with a skateboard may make one free move down the parking structure each turn
10: A bear with a peerage counts as two bears when entering the UFO.
11: If a bear enters a space with a disco ball, the player may roll one die and move an IRS agent up to that many spaces.
12: If an IRS agent enters a space with a bear, the bear must surrender a Flamethrower, Skateboard or Peerage. If they cannot, they are sent back to the top of the parking structure. The item they have surrendered is placed randomly on the board as during Setup.
13: If a player rolls two sixes and President Nixon is not on the board, they may replace an IRS agent of their choice with President Nixon
14: If a player rolls two sixes and President Nixon is already on the board, they may swap President Nixon’s position with that of any IRS agent
15: President Nixon is treated the same as an IRS agent, but two dice are rolled for his movement
16: If a player rolls two ones and President Nixon is on the board, replace President Nixon with the Lame Duck.
17: If a player rolls two ones and the Lame Duck is on the board, replace the Lame Duck with President Nixon.
18: The Lame Duck never moves
19: The first player to move ten bears into their UFO wins the game.

I saw a UFO this morning.

At this point people are probably going “Oh god! Don’t tell me he believes in UFOs! He’s insane! I’m never reading this blog again!”. To which I say “Of course I believe in UFOs! I’ve seen a number of them over the years, I’d be mad to not believe in them!”

The point of course is that when you say “UFO” you probably mean “alien spaceship”, and when I say “UFO” I mean exactly what it says on the box – an Unidentified Flying Object.

Now I suppose it’s possible that any given UFO could be an alien spaceship, but – as a person with a decent grasp of both interstellar distances and physics – I wouldn’t be holding my breath. While I’m of the opinion that some UFOs may turn out to be anomalous – which is to say they are examples of a phenomena currently uncategorised by science – common sense dictates that the vast, vast majority of sightings are perfectly ordinary objects (such as aircraft, birds, stars, clouds, planets, meteors, etc.) seen from funny angles or under unusual conditions. I’m sure for instance that what I saw this morning was a plane either taking off from or circling to land at Perth Airport, which is only five or so kilometres from the site of my observation, Bayswater Railway Station.

What I saw at 8:33 this morning was a shining, slightly ovoid disc traveling from right to left across the east-north-eastern sky for between 30 seconds and a minute. It kept level at about four fingers above the treeline, and covered a distance of about four fingers before passing behind a cloud and vanishing. A mass of thin, whispy dark cloud was blowing across the sky from left to right, and the object was passing behind it, occasionally vanishing behind pillars of cloud – I was careful to note that the object was moving relative to the ground, not just to the cloud. Its level of brightness varied up and down, but remained constant for the last ten seconds of observation.

There were a large number of people on the platform at the time, but no-one else seemed to notice the object – or if they did they just assumed it was a plane. Which it almost certainly was. I considered taking a photo, but really couldn’t be bothered 🙂

So there we are. UFOs buzzing Bayswater. Tune in next week when I tell you about the thylacine I saw down by the river!

(Note: I have never actually seen a thylacine down by the river or indeed anywhere else :))

Tag: UFO

Battery Bear Hustle

Sightings