Have you ever played 6-tage rennen? if not you should,. It is a terrific little game, along with Condottiore and Carcassone amongst the finest fluffy games ever designed.

What is particularly interesting about 6 tage rennen is that there is no luck (you all get the same cards 1 x 7, 2 x 5, 3 x 4 and 4 x 1-3 (I think that's right might be wrong) and you have to co-operate to win. The game is simple, maybe even fewer than 8.6 pages and thus not complexity 4). Like most eurogames there is only one trick (under Big Game's benign view that two ideas = two games) but the trick is a beauty. If you land on the same space as other players you get to slipstream by the card you played x the number of players on that space (optimal 7 spaces behind all 5 other races, you bounce on them and go another 35 spaces forwards, you can walk home and you will win).

Thus the testosterone wild thrusters go charging out with their best cards storming to a commanding lead only to dimwittedly realise halfway through the race they don't have enough cards to get home. The women on the other hand are helping each other at the back of the pack to slipstream through the traffic then put their competitive hats on for the final sprint to the finish line.

7 Ages is the same. Despite what BGG reckons of the original 7 Ages, 7 Ages in all its manifestation is NOT a wargame, it is a Civilisation and world history game. World in Flames is a wargame (BGG I 'd like you to meet WiF, WiF, BGG) 7 Ages is not.

In 7 Ages you don't win by crushing people you win by getting glory points, nearly all of of which you gain from scientific, cultural, religious and artistic expansion NOT crushing people. Sure you get glory from land but there's lots of spare land out there you don't have to roll over your mates to get it. More than 95% of civilisations gain ZERO glory by attacking people ZERO. The other 5% (like the Huns and the Mongols) get SOME glory points from crushing people but even there in most cases not all. The rest nada.

Our game is in our view an accurate recreation of history, at least in so far as 8.6 pages of rules allow. But spoiler alert, from my understanding of history it has had the odd spot of bother over the years and ADG is not in the business of sacharine lies about how everything is sweetness and light (like many other fluffy games that dare to dwell on the past), clearly it is not. But you will never see the word "combat" in our rules, its "conflict resolution" and who is against conflict resolution?

The winner of 7 Ages is not the one who try to crush their opponents, they will come last as they irritate everybody else around the table. Yes there will be conflict but the winner will be the player who can surf history causing the least amount of friction along the way. In our multi-player games Neil nearly always wins, not because he's the best gamer (sorry Neil), he isn't but he's the player everyone likes the most, he has extraordinary diplomatic skills and whenever we give up the ghost on winning well we're not helping that bully win, we're going to do all in our power to help Neil win.

If you want to take anything from the game you need look no further than my comment in the designer's notes of World in Flames.

"World in Flames concentrates on the political, economic and military aspects of the greatest human caused catastrophe in history (to date) with more than 50 million killed and tens of million more wounded or made homeless. World in Flames is not about the morality of the war. But World in Flames is a study of the war and if it teaches us anything, it teaches that the politics of inclusion, even though it may take 5 years (or 50), in the end, will always beat the politics of exclusion."

25 years ago i watched a Compass programme about the 3 elements of happiness hosted by Australia's living legend Geraldine Doogue that is the most influential programme I have ever listened to (rang up the ABC and told Geraldine directly how incredible it was and they should repeat it).

Of the 3 elements the most important is the third, "the successful completion of a task in co-operation with other people". This is why people get happiness from work (provided they enjoy the work and are contributing to the project's success). When you do the washing up or hang out the clothes give yourself a clap on the back because dopamine will be surging through you that a job's been done and your space around you is cleaner. But do that with others and you can high five each other because you've done it together and the dopamine will triple.

Yes in 7 Ages, just like 6 tage Rennen there is competition but the winners will be those who co-operate throughout the game then sprint to the finsih not those who spend all their time building armies in a feeble attempt to crush the world. In other words 7 Ages is an anti-wargame. Do you have a category for that BGG?

Thus in my PHD thesis, my theory is that while the men are brawling in Europe, the women are trading peacefully in Africa and it will be the traders that win not the thugs.

This is assuming BGG doesn't slur the game by calling it a wargame which is basically them saying "Women stay away" and we lose half our audience before the game is even launched. Yes we are a wargame making company but not exclusively (eg Rub out and world cup football) and this game has military units so therefore it is a wargame irrespective of the philosophy or goals of the game. This is a lazy technical definition of a game, not a reflection of the game itself and what it is trying to promote.

And that would be a shame not only to us but to all women who would get to strut their stuff should they ever check it out. I can die a happy man where somewhere sometime a woman says to her partner "hey lets play 7 Ages" to get the response "nah you always win".

Hey BigGame, if you're interested, replace all the military units with wooden blocks, call them population rather than armies (because we all know armies have never existed throughout history), junk the backup values, just have one value which changes over time and is spelt out on the progress track (the wooden blocks are blank, just coloured, how cheap is that to print?) when an empire's units (sorry people, DOH!) increase in value, and voila you have 7 Ages Fluffy! Sounds like a winner to me, fun for all the family! Might even get the rules down to 6 or 7 pages if I can cut down those tedious 2 pages of manoeuvre rules the poor customer has to wade through at the moment. Will that still be too much or do I have to get it down to 4 pages like all your other games? Looking forward to your call!

7 Ages is also very educational. Not one in a thousand know where Trans-Oxiana is (do you?). Not one in a million care. Well when Trans-Oxiana is your homeland and you get glory for homeland it is amazing how interested you will suddenly become in where in the world is Trans Oxiana. And not only Trans-Oxiana but all Trans-Oxiana's neighbours in the age you're in (and the next if you are a forward thinking leader). Who are they? Who are they led by? And most importantly, are you on their glory menu?

7 Ages teaches history, geography, science, culture, art, architecture, civilisations, their special abilities and the things they yearned for. All without feeling you have had a hard time learning anything at all, had fun actually. We want educators to come to us and buy the game and share it amongst their students. As far as we can we have tried to represent all civilisations fairly (rounding up the values of our biggest markets natch). No doubt we have made mistakes but 7 Ages is a living beast and its easy to change an ability here or a glory category there to make the game even more historical. But If BGG slur 7 Ages as a wargame, this will never happen. Labels matter.

PS I am intending to do a PhD thesis but about the art of manual design using 7 Ages as the protagonist as I think its features (sequence of play layout, only say everything once, everything has a meaning and a meaning for everything, heavy cross-referenceing and glossing, minimising words etc) can be used as a template not just for game manual but for any manual in any field.

As a professional, most manuals are written by illiterates with little knowledge of what they write and even less ability to communicate to others what they do know. ANU was replete with distinguished professors who were entirely incompetent at explaining anything at all, while ensuring our mandatory reading was all their unintelligible books (got to keep the royalties flowing somehow after all).

But I am interested in the gendering of games as most of course (like all the mindless shooters) are gendered towards males while those that are subtly gendered towards women (like 6 tage rennen) are less well known and no doubt those woke professors at the University of Queensland (another mindless stereotype, I hope you're not reading this UQ PHD co-ordinator and if you are, please note this is only jocular irony and I'm totes on your side, honest) will notch me up to first class honours if I rabbit on a bit about that.