Conway's Life Lab

Conway's Life Lab turns the classic Game of Life into a hands-on playground for curiosity.

Draw on a large zoomable board, load famous patterns, and watch simple local rules create surprising behavior. Standard Conway Life—B3/S23 with wrapping toroidal boundaries—is ready the moment you open the app.

When you want to look closer, open the optional Lab:

• Inspect any cell and count its eight neighbors
• Predict birth, survival, or death before stepping
• See transitions highlighted directly on the board
• Rewind recent generations without changing the latest state
• Compare wrapping and finite boundaries
• Explore eight named binary Life-like B/S rule presets
• Try six illustrated demos of self-copying patterns, geometry, and motion
• Follow guided experiments built around classic patterns
• Track population changes over time

In Lab > Explore Rules, discover Replicator, Persian Rug, Maze, and 2×2 alongside familiar Life-like rules. Apply a rule to keep your current cells, or confirm Try demo to load a centered starting pattern. Each demo starts paused and includes a short guide to what to watch for. This collection is free and runs entirely on your device.

Free play stays simple: navigate, draw, inspect, play, pause, step, randomize, adjust speed, and browse a thumbnail library of gliders, oscillators, spaceships, methuselahs, and more. Save discoveries from your board, import standard RLE patterns from the wider Life community, and share any board or gallery pattern as a portable .rle file. Imported patterns keep compatible B/S rules; saved patterns can be renamed, reloaded, or deleted whenever you like.

Make the laboratory your own with six built-in looks: Neon, Synthwave, Terminal, Blueprint, Paper, and Retro LCD. Choose square, rounded, or circular cells. Your appearance is saved on your device, and changing it preserves your board, rules, and progress.

Where available, describe a visual idea in AI Pattern Studio. It creates a best-effort binary Life-like rule and starting pattern that you can keep, rename, export, delete, and evolve on the board. Each generated pattern is a separate consumable In-App Purchase; all core Play, Lab, pattern, and RLE features remain available without purchase.

No account. No ads. No analytics. No tracking. Core features run on your device; where AI Create is available, it sends only the description you choose through Sub Rosa's service to a third-party generation provider. See the privacy policy for details.