World in Progress

“World in Progress” is a tile-laying game from Awaken Realms Lite. Now, Awaken Realms is one of my favourite publishers, and I absolutely adore the Nemesis franchise, but their Lite series hasn’t always quite hit the spot. I played Flick of Faith a few years ago and, while it was a good game, there were a few issues with component quality, and it didn’t quite land for me. But I was particularly intrigued to pick up World in Progress, and that’s the game we’re going to be looking at today.

World in Progress is set in the same universe as Flick of Faith and features all your favourite gods from different mythologies, all trying to build a world—or be a world—on a 3×3 tile grid. You set the game up by creating three piles of tiles and making a 3×3 neutral map in the centre of the board.

You then place the all-important faith pointers around the board and each take a hidden god token. What you’re trying to do is create your own 3×3 grid by grouping as many tiles of the same colour as possible. The scoring system works by multiplying the size of your largest connected area of one colour by the number of god statues you have in that colour.

This kind of scoring is fairly common. When explaining it to my kids, I usually call it Kingdomino scoring, but it’s used in loads of tile-laying games and is something most people can pick up quickly.

What’s interesting in this game is how you draw the tiles. The faith pointers placed on the neutral map at the start of the game dictate your choices. At the start of your turn, you have to move one of these pointers, and then, using its direction, you slide out a row of tiles, taking the one that gets pushed out of the neutral map.

The problem is that you have to move the faith pointer, and you can’t slide tiles out through another pointer that’s already there. This means that, realistically, on your turn, you only have two or three possible tiles to take. Once you start getting the hang of the game, you can also look at what your opponents need and manipulate the faith pointers in a way that stops them from taking the tile they really want.

This led to some pretty heated moments in our game, mostly because the boys got really into blocking each other from getting that all-important tile that would massively boost their score.

Each player also gets a token at the start of the game. At any point, you can use this token to take a tile that features your god’s colour, either as a square of land or as a god statue. It quickly became apparent that this is best saved for the end of the game, when you have a better idea of where you need extra points. Of course, by that point, the other players have also worked out what you’re trying to do and are probably trying to block you from getting those last few tiles.

After everyone has finished their 3×3 grid, the game ends, and it’s time to count up the scores.

You score by multiplying the number of statues in each colour by the size of your largest connected area in that colour, then total everything up. The highest score wins.

Component quality is good, though nothing incredible. Everything is a reasonable card stock, and it comes with a really nice scorepad, which I always appreciate in these kinds of games since it makes final scoring easier. The box size is good, but it sits in that awkward space of being smaller than a normal board game but not quite travel-sized. The artwork is really nice, and I do hope Awaken Realms makes more games in this gods series.

It’s a really simple game that takes the basics of a tried-and-tested tile-laying system and adds a surprisingly engaging way of drawing tiles. I wouldn’t say it’s my absolute favourite tile-laying game—there are others like “Rome in a Day” or “Akropolis” that offer similar gameplay but are more compelling—but for younger kids, this is an easy game to get into.

For little ones, this could definitely be a great introduction to tile-laying games, as well as a way to introduce some more thoughtful drafting mechanics. You could also simplify it further by removing the faith pointers entirely, letting younger kids pick tiles based on what they think fits best in their world.

Overall, it’s a solid little tile-laying game with a clever drafting system. It won’t replace my favourites, but I’m glad I gave it a go.