Conway's Conquerors

1v1 Strategy on Conway's Game of Life

Demo: 

Test it out now on browser: https://terriblecrow.com/conquerors/

The Core Idea

Two colonies. One 26×28 board. John Conway's Game of Life as the physics. You place four cells per turn (or bomb, or skip), then the board evolves for one generation under its own rules — and you watch what you accidentally built, or destroyed.

Win by extinction or cell-count majority after twelve rounds. No hidden information. No randomness (except in which cells you place). The future is deterministic: given a board and a sequence of moves, you can predict the outcome exactly.

Game Modes

• Practice (sandbox): Control both colonies on a single device. The game drops rotating tips about stable formations, invasion strategy, and when NOT to place cells. Solo learning space.
• vs CPU: Three difficulties (Easy, Normal, Hard). The CPU simulates Conway one generation ahead for each candidate placement, scores it by the net change in its own cells (capturing both suicidal placements and the kamikaze "kills your own cells" failure mode), and picks from a weighted pool. Normal doesn't suicide. Hard reads the board as a predator. Easy is sloppy — high noise, weak evaluation — but never brainless.
• Online Multiplayer: Play live against anyone in the world with a room code. WebSocket for low latency; the client automatically falls back to HTTP long-polling if a hosting proxy kills the WebSocket tunnel (you'll never see it — it's transparent). The server is authoritative: every move is validated, no cheating possible.

The Experience

• Short play loops: 12 rounds, 1–2 minutes per game.
• No setup friction: no install, no account, no sign-up. Open a link, play.
• Guided mode: preview the next evolution before you commit your moves. See your placements' consequences in real time.
• Escalating complexity: early rounds feel tactical (where do I place?); late rounds become strategic (I must have access to enemy territory by round 7, or I've locked myself out).
• Punishing but fair: the board has no memory of your intent — it evolves by its own rules. A placement that "looks smart" can accidentally overpopulate your own cells and wipe you out. This is not a bug; it's the game's soul.

What You're Actually Playing

You're playing a two-player perfect-information game on top of a universal computational system that follows deterministic physics. Every match is a collision between your strategy (place cells to control the board's future) and Conway's system (which has no favorites and evolves the same way regardless of color). The brilliant part is that the system isn't broken or biased — it's just indifferent. Invasion is hard because the rules of birth don't care about your ambition. Your cells die if they're alone because the universe decided cells need company. This is strategy without complexity creep, elegance through constraint.

No Ads. No Paywalls. No Accounts.

Free. Play online, offline, whenever. The server respects your time: you're not tracked, your games aren't monetized, nothing is hidden behind a subscription. The only things stored locally are your language preference and whether you muted the sound.

Links

• Play: https://terriblecrow.com/play/
• About the studio: https://terriblecrow.com/
• Technical report: https://terriblecrow.com/TECHNICAL-PAPER.md (if you want to know how the automaton works at the bit level)
• Android app (Trusted Web Activity): coming to Play Store; install from web in the meantime.
• Mail me: contact@terriblecrow.com