How to play
The Game of Life is a cellular automaton invented by the mathematician John Horton Conway in 1970. It is a zero-player game: you choose the starting pattern and the rules decide everything after that. Each cell of the grid is either alive (blue) or dead (white), and time moves in steps called generations. In every generation all cells update at the same moment.
Draw cells with the mouse or a finger, or pick a pattern from the library and click the board to drop it. Press Play to run or Step to advance one generation. Reset returns to the last preset, loaded pattern or the drawing you started from.
Rules
Every cell looks at its eight neighbours: above, below, left, right and the four diagonals.
- Birth: a dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes alive.
- Survival: a live cell with two or three live neighbours stays alive.
- Death: any other live cell dies, from loneliness (0 or 1 neighbours) or overcrowding (4 or more).
This rule is written B3/S23: born with 3, survives with 2 or 3. The Rules tab offers other rules of the same kind, such as HighLife (B36/S23), Seeds (B2/S), Day & Night (B3678/S34678) and Life without Death (B3/S012345678), or you can type your own. Rules with B0 are not supported, because they would switch the whole empty board on at once.
The original game uses an endless plane, but this board has edges. With Wrap around the left edge joins the right and the top joins the bottom, like the surface of a doughnut (a torus), so a glider leaving one side comes back on the other. With Dead border everything outside counts as dead, and patterns that reach the edge usually break apart.
Controls
Mouse
- Click toggles a cell. Drag paints with the new state of the first cell, so a stroke starting on a live cell erases.
- Right-drag erases, the wheel zooms, middle-drag or the Pan tool moves the view.
Touch
- Tap toggles a cell, drag paints. Draw, Erase and Pan set what one finger does.
- Pinch to zoom and move, or use the zoom buttons. Grid lines appear when cells are large enough.
Keyboard
- Space play or pause, N step (also → outside the board), C clear.
- R rotates the pattern being placed, Esc stops placing.
- + and − zoom, 0 fits the board, arrow keys pan when the board has focus.
Tips and strategy
- Follow a glider. Place one and press Step four times: it returns to its shape, moved one cell diagonally. The LWSS spaceship moves two cells every four generations.
- Start a methuselah. The five-cell R-pentomino keeps changing for 1103 generations on an unlimited plane before it settles; on a finite board the edges change the ending. Diehard vanishes after 130 generations.
- Play with the gun. The Gosper glider gun fires a glider every 30 generations. In the Glider gun preset an eater swallows each one. Erase the eater and watch the stream on a wrapped board.
- Crash things. Colliding gliders can leave a block, a blinker or nothing at all.
- Swap the rule. Life without Death grows like ink, Seeds explodes from almost anything, and in Day & Night live and dead regions behave the same way.
- Make soup. A random fill of 25 to 40 percent usually burns out into blocks, beehives and blinkers.
Frequently asked questions
Why does a pattern change near the edge?
The board is finite. With Wrap around, cells on one edge neighbour the opposite edge; with Dead border, the outside is dead. Either way a pattern touching the edge can differ from the endless plane. A larger grid delays this.
What does B3/S23 mean?
B lists the neighbour counts that bring a dead cell to life, S the counts that keep a live cell alive. HighLife, B36/S23, adds birth on 6.
Why did everything die?
Most small drawings have too few neighbours and fade within a few generations. The simulation pauses when no live cells remain. Try a preset or a methuselah.
Can I use patterns from other Life programs?
Yes. RLE is the common text format: b is a dead cell, o a live one, $ ends a row, ! ends the pattern and a number repeats the next symbol. Paste it into the RLE tab; a supported rule in the header is applied too. Export copies your board as RLE.
Is my work saved?
The board and settings are stored in your browser and return when you reload, and the Saved tab keeps up to five named drawings. If storage is blocked, everything still works but is forgotten when you leave.
Can the Game of Life compute things?
Yes. With gliders as signals and patterns that combine them like logic gates, it can simulate a universal computer, although such machines are far too large for this board.
More free games
- Falling Sand – a physics sandbox of sand, water and fire.
- Gravity Simulator – build orbits and planetary systems.
- Flocking Simulator – simple rules, bird-like flocks.
- Double Pendulum – chaos with two linked pendulums.
- Minesweeper – clear the field with pure logic.
- Nonogram – reveal a picture from number clues.
- Sudoku – the classic number logic puzzle.
- 2048 – slide and merge tiles to reach 2048.