Session Report: '7 Ages'

'7 Ages' is a lengthy world conquest and civilisation-building game from an Australian design house. Augustine who was hosting this session and game has typed out this report:

David, Andreas, Augustine, Weiyi and Wayne are currently playing 7 ages, from Age 1 :) Here's the report for the first session. Enjoy...

7 Ages Session Report

At the dawn of recorded history, the Chinese have first claim to the title of the world’s oldest civilisation. Yet the Zhou dynasty was but the first among equals. In the fertile plains of the Middle East, men thrived and grew in numbers, expanding their territory and making great advances. The Phoenicians were the first to discover waterborne trade, with the Minoans close on their heels. Trading on dangerously stormy seas and built ever expanding fleets of triremes, their fleets ranged the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.

Meanwhile, in the heart of Europe, the Amazons and the Gauls multiplied, prospered and spread across the land, encircling their smaller neighbour, the Cimmerians. Yet no great conflict raged between these expanding peoples, as each sought to fill the niche they had sprung from. Great cities were built by the Etruscans and the Carthaginians (who else built cities? I think there was one more civ)

The Egyptians, under the brilliant leadership of insert age 1 leader name here, drove relentlessly southward and created an empire that spanned the east coast of Africa, encompassing an area that made it one of the biggest empires of its time. The philosopher queen Zena of the Amazons exhibited her keen edge over her neighbours, even as they strove to compete in terms of glorious achievements.

The first signs of serious human conflict began in China. Convinced that the Zhou dynasty was decadent and weak, the Qin and Shang made their bid for power one after the other. The resulting three way contest saw the surprising defeat of these rebel movements, as the Zhou showed more resilience than expected. Mobilising more manpower than anyone had given them credit for (Weiyi played 2 cards in sequence to increase production or something), the Zhou maintained their hold over China for a little time longer. The subsequent volcanic eruption (or was it an earthquake? Think I was away from the table or wasn’t paying attention then) devastated key areas in China, leading to widespread disorder and chaos. Chinese civilization entered a dark age as the governments, legitimate and rebel alike, collapsed in the wake of the disaster. They would not recover till the Han dynasty several centuries later. (Historical note: There has been some debate about the exclusion from official Chinese historical records of the Japanese colonization of the fertile wheat areas of Shantung and Hopei in the years preceding the Han dynasty)

Euro-African civilization continued blissfully unaware of the disasters, manmade and natural, happening to their Chinese cousins. The rise of the Assyrians as a military power was to change the status quo of the Middle East completely. The first power to fall to the sleek Assyrian war machine was the Sumerians (I think?). The short lived Babylonian empire was the next to follow, after their ill-fated attempt to destroy the Assyrians through treachery backfired as a result of a spy who turned out to be a double-agent. The Assyrians swept south next and took the capital of the hapless Egyptian empire, which had stagnated in the years after the initial expansion and was facing severe disorder in the southern mountainous provinces after an earthquake (is it just me, or do earthquakes like happen ever so often in this version of history :P ) The loss of the capital proved to be the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. The Egyptian empire collapsed. The Phoenicians lost land to the Assyrian aggressors too, but did not meet the fate of the other empires (at this time of writing, they have not, that is )

The origin of the Huns remains steeped in myth and hearsay. Some scholars accept the Bucklandi explanation that they were the male slaves of the matriachial Amazonian society who rose up against the latter while others contend that the Huns, like all other civilizations, simply sprang into existence. Whatever their origins, the first act of the Hunnish hordes was to pillage the newly rebuilt Amazonian capital (the old one had been destroyed by, you’ve guessed it, an earthquake), knocking the Amazonians back an ages in the process. They then headed southwest, where the largest concentration of cities was. The name of Attila the Hun would strike fear in the hearts of the Etruscan society.

The scarcely populated Americas took yet another hit when a volcano wiped out the budding Inca civilization. Recent findings surmise that if the Incas had spread themselves out ever so slightly, they might have avoided the civilization destroying cataclysm which left the plains dwelling native Americans the sole survivors in the Americas.

India was relatively peaceful as the Harrapans co-existed with the Tamils with the former taking the north and the latter the south.

It was also around this period that the Javanese trading kingdom came into being.

End of report for Session 1.

Addendum

Recent scholarship (Weiyi, the patron god of the Zhou told me over MSN) has convincingly shown that the battle of Schechuan was won as a result of a Zhou spy in the Qin high command and the rapid dispatch of reinforcements from neighbouring provinces (In game terms, Weiyi played ‘High Command’ that forced Wayne to commit 1-3 units per battle as well as another card that allowed him to shift units from an adjacent province to join the battle). It was not, as was erroneously believed, the result of more manpower on the part of the Zhou but rather the application of that said force that led the Zhou to triumph over the other dynastic pretenders.