Thanks everyone for playing along

. As you figured, this was indeed an April Fools' joke, and we hope you enjoyed it.
At the end, it turns out to be not so easy to balance the part that it needs to be believable to a certain extent, but also somewhere it must be an obvious joke. I hope we kinda managed.
All joking aside, I'm starting to worry that their previous allusion to "the next civ game" might not be a much anticipated Civ 7 announcement, but rather just a setup for this April Fools joke.

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I don’t know for sure, but I don’t think this is our joke.
This was our joke, Firaxis was indeed not involved.
Last year I thought about asking to collaborate, but it turns out that organizing this is always... problematic, because we essentially forget about it too often.
e.g. this year Leif started the thread for some brainstorming already in the middle of February, and we had quite some good ideas, but at the end we still nearly forgot about it.
Which is why The_J handpicked them.
Yes, also that, but the credits go to the whole team

. We had in total 14 moderators brainstorming and throwing in ideas. I put everything together at the end, Gedemon sent it once through chatGPT to enhance the writing, and we made some final edits afterwards. Gedemon also produced the pictures with MidJourney (I think).
Initially we first wanted to go with Civ8 (after the announcement someone joked about that on Twitter, and since Microsoft left out Windows 9...), then the suggestion was just Civ, then Civ Infinite (last version, long running support like WoW), just "Civilization", and Browd suggested at the end Civ2K23, which was probably the best choice

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EDIT:
In hindsight, maybe should have gone with the Lenin pictures.
I also notice that the Gandhi pictures have the same type of faulty chain as the puff-jacket pictures of the pope

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