QT/C++ - Accessing MainWindow UI from a different class

I'm a beginner to both C++ and Qt, so perhaps this is trivial. It certainly feels like it should be simple, but I've been searching for an answer for a few hours now and can't find the solution. I'm making a simple board game where the MainWindow's ui (made in QtDesigner) contains a canvas for the game board (a QGraphicsView). Now, the main.cpp is as simple as can be:

MainWindow Game;

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
 QApplication a(argc, argv);

 Game.show();

return a.exec();
}

Since I need to access and edit the MainWindow Widgets from another totally unrelated class, I thought the easiest way would be to just make MainWindow a global variable. It seems that this approach was very wrong, though. Upon trying to run the project in QtDesigner I get a Microsoft Visual C++ runtime library error: the application has requested runtime to terminate it in an unusual way.

So what is the correct way to do what I need?

Aside from the MainWindow I have a dialog for a new game (QDialog, generated from QtDesigner) that is displayed after clicking a menu item in MainWindow. When the user inputs all parameters for the game and clicks OK in the dialog, I instantiate a custom non-Qt class called GameState. This class is meant to operate the game itself, draw the board, prompt the user, etc. However, as this class is created in the QDialog, it does not know of the existence of a MainWindow and so I cannot do anything with the MainWindow from this class. How can I modify the MainWindow from an unrelated class, then?

Also, jsut how does the setEnabled() function work? It never seems to do anything. Any widget I set as disabled in the QtDesigner and then try to enable through this function still stays disabled in the GUI...