Conway's Conquerors

First of all: No Ads. No Paywalls. No Accounts.

The Core Idea:

This is a 1v1 Strategy game inspired by 'Conway's Game of Life' rules.

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 by the higher score after twelve rounds. And here's the twist that makes it a territory game: your cells inside the enemy's half count double. But you can't just walk in — invasion demands you hold ground at home, in the middle, and across the line all at once, and the first cell on their side has to be born there by the evolution, not placed. 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. Hard goes further: it plans its entire four-cell turn one generation ahead, defends its home anchor so it never locks itself out of the board, and actively pushes for the doubled enemy zone — it reads the board like a predator. Normal doesn't suicide. 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 need a foothold in every zone to invade — and if I lose my home cells, I'm locked out of the center and the enemy's half until I rebuild).
• 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: you can't place your way into enemy territory, you have to grow there. Your cells die if they're alone because the universe decided cells need company. This is strategy without complexity creep, elegance through constraint.

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Gameboy Demake Project:

Conway's Conquerors now runs on real Game Boy hardware.

This is an official 8-bit demake for the Nintendo Game Boy (DMG), the Game Boy Pocket, and the Game Boy Color — written in C with SDCC, no GBDK. The boot sequence, the cartridge header, and every hardware register are hand-written. Two colonies, Conway's B3/S23 rules, and the full three-tier AI, running on a 4 MHz CPU. It's not a port of the web version's renderer — it's the same game rebuilt from the metal up.

The same rules you know — including the V2 territory layer. Place up to 4 cells per turn, end with START, watch one generation evolve. SELECT skips your turn (once per game). Your cells inside the enemy zone count x2, and invasion still demands a foothold in every zone before you can cross the line.

What you get on cartridge:

• Free .gb ROM for both DMG and Game Boy Color builds. Runs on real hardware, flashcarts, and emulators.
• 2-player over Link Cable — head to head on two real Game Boys.
• Battery-backed save — your stats persist on the cartridge (MBC3 + RAM + battery).
• WALL / WRAP board modes — flip the edge from a classic bounded wall to a full torus, where colonies pressing on one side sprout from the other.
• Original chiptune title theme, with separate timbres for DMG and Game Boy Color.
• Full instruction booklet as a PDF — old-school box art, board rules, strategy, and the STATS screen, laid out like a real Game Boy manual. Four versions: COLOR/DMG × EN/ES.

Play it right now, no flashcart needed — the dedicated page boots the actual ROM in your browser via binjgb (WebAssembly). Arrows = D-Pad, Z/X = B/A, Enter = START, Tab = SELECT. (Link-cable 2-player needs real hardware or a desktop emulator.)

→ Game Boy edition + ROM download and ONLINE play! https://conwayconquerors.com/demake/

→ Devlog — the GB & GBC port: https://terriblecrow.itch.io/conways-conquerors/devlog/1557394/gb-and-gbc-port-for-cc 

→ Source on GitHub: https://github.com/terriblecrow/Pocket-Conquerors

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Links

• Official site : https://conwaysconquerors.com
• Official trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SKN_jUTv4Y
• Play Online:  https://play.conwayconquerors.online
  
• About the studio:  https://terriblecrow.com/
• Technical report: https://conwayconquerors.com/RESEARCH-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