How the Game of Life works

A 32 by 32 Conway board lives on Ethereum. It steps every 30 minutes. Players put cells on it by drawing random pattern cards and playing them. Living cells earn from a shared pot every tick. The board shrinks until only the center is left, the world ends, and the next one begins. Surviving a world mints a piece of the collection.

Two tokens sit around one coin. GOL is the coin: you spend it to draw and you earn it by staying alive. Cards are the patterns you draw, and they burn when you play them. Pieces are the fossils of finished worlds, and they own the vault.

Tutorial

1. Get GOL. Buy it on Uniswap. The GET GOL button in the app opens the right pair.
2. Connect and draw. Pick a quantity and press Draw. Your wallet asks you to approve GOL once, then to confirm the draw. Chainlink picks the cards a block or two later and they flip over on the page.
3. Play a card. Tap it in your hand. It follows your cursor on the board as a green ghost. Press R or ROTATE to turn it. Tap to drop it. Red means the spot is taken, off the board, or on the ring that dies next.
4. Wait for the tick. Your cells land after the next tick, then face the rules. A lone Spark dies at once. A Block lives until something touches it. A Glider moves one square diagonally every four ticks.
5. Earn and claim. Every tick, each living cell you own earns an equal slice of 4% of the pot. Press CLAIM whenever you like.
6. Attack and defend. Drop a Spark beside someone's Block and two of their cells die at the next step while yours lives. Aim a Glider at a pattern you want gone. Leave a gap of empty squares around your own shapes so nothing touches them.
7. Survive the end. Only the 8 by 8 core survives the twelfth collapse. Be alive there and you can mint the world's Survivor piece. Hold the most cells and you get the Crown, and your cells start the next world in the center.

You can practise all of this for free in the demo, which runs the same rules locally with pretend players.

Worlds and ticks

A world is 24 ticks. A tick happens every 30 minutes and does three things in order: it steps the board one generation by the rules of Life, it pays every living owned cell, and it lands the cards played since the last tick. New cells therefore face one step before they earn anything.

Every second tick the outer ring of the board dies. After 12 collapses only the 8 by 8 core remains. That tick ends the world. The next world starts at once on the same schedule, so world start times never drift, even if a tick runs late.

The winner's surviving cells are copied into the center of the new world and still belong to them. Carried cells earn payouts, but they never count for a Crown or a piece: winning again takes new cards. A world in which nobody played mints no Crown, carries nothing over, and draws no fresh seed.

Entries close one tick before the end. Nothing can land on the final tick and count as a survivor without facing the rules.

Draws and cards

A draw costs 10,000 GOL, up to 10 at a time. The GOL is split at once: 80% to the pot, 12.5% burned, 5% to the vault, 2.5% to the team. Then the contract asks Chainlink VRF for a random number. When it arrives, a block or two later, the cards are minted to your wallet as ERC-1155 tokens. Nobody, including the deployer, can influence which card you get.

Cards trade like any token. A Glider is worth something to a player under attack. A Chaos is worth something to anyone.

If Chainlink never answers a draw, which can happen if the subscription runs dry, the player can reclaim the pot's share of what they paid after 24 hours. The burned share and the vault share are gone. A late answer after a reclaim mints nothing.

Playing

Playing burns the card and queues its cells with the top left corner at the square you chose, turned as you chose. Every square must be dead, not already queued, and inside the ring that survives the next collapse. If any square fails, nothing happens and you keep the card.

Two limits keep one wallet from owning the board: at most 4 plays per tick, and at most 48 cells per world. The core has 64 squares, so no single wallet can fill it.

You own every square a card covers. Ownership stays with you after the cell dies. If someone plays over a dead square you own, they take it, and whatever it earned you is settled into your balance at that moment. A moving pattern leaves its owned squares behind, so a Glider is a weapon rather than an income.

Payouts and the pot

Every tick, the contract takes a snapshot of the cells that are alive and owned, and pays each of them an equal share of 4% of the pot. The rest of the pot rolls on. It never resets and it never pays out in one jackpot, so being alive early is worth the same as being alive late.

Earnings are attached to squares. Claim passes the squares you own and pays everything they earned since your last claim, plus any settled balance. There is no deadline. The pot grows from draws and from a reserve that seeds every new world with 1,000,000 GOL.

Launch bonus

For the first 15 days after deployment, a launch fund of 2% of supply matches every tick payout. If the fund cannot cover a full match it pays what it has. The fund pays nothing after the window closes.

Pieces and the vault

When a world ends, anyone who owned a living cell in the core can mint that world's Survivor piece, one per player per world. The player with the most living cells gets the Crown instead, minted at once. Ties go to whichever survivor's first cell comes earlier reading the core row by row. 420 Survivor pieces will ever exist. Crowns are not capped.

A piece is an ERC-721 whose image is drawn by the contract from the world's own tick snapshots: every ring shows what was alive when it died, faint ghosts mark everything that ever lived, the core glows, and the holder's cells are lit in the world's palette.

The vault takes 5% of every draw. Every piece is a share of it: a Survivor piece is one share, a Crown is twenty. Burning a piece pays its share and destroys it. Selling a piece passes the share to the buyer. Until the first piece exists the vault cut joins the pot instead.

Rarity

Card rarity is the draw odds, and the frame shows it: a thin grey line for Common, a coloured line for Uncommon, a doubled line for Rare, a dashed inner line for Epic, and a gold double frame with a halo for Legendary.

Piece traits come from play: Cells, Share of the survivors, the Shape your cells formed, how early you held ground, the size of the pot, and the world's era. One thing is rolled per world, the palette. Ember, Abyss and Moss are Common. Rust and Violet are Uncommon. Bone and Blood are Rare. Aurum is Legendary, at 2% of worlds. The frame on a piece follows the same ladder as the cards, and a Crown always carries the accent colour.

Ticks and keepers

Anyone can call tick once it is due and earns 2,000 GOL from a tick fund. If nobody calls it, the world pauses and catches up one tick per call once someone does. The app shows an advance button whenever a tick is due. The team runs a keeper as a backstop.

Fees

Three fees go to the team, and all three arrive as ETH. Every GOL trade, buy or sell, pays 1%. Every draw pays 2.5%, taken from the burn share, so the pot is untouched. Every sale of a piece or a card on a marketplace carries a 5% royalty, which the marketplace pays in the sale currency; most enforce it, some treat it as optional.

The trade and draw fees are collected in GOL inside the token contract, which sells them on the Uniswap pair itself and sends the ETH to the fee wallet. Anyone can trigger that sale. The fee wallet never holds or sells GOL.

The deployer wallet is locked by the token contract: after launch it can move GOL only into the game or burn it. It cannot sell, cannot add liquidity, and cannot pass tokens to another wallet. Anyone can verify this from the contract.

Contracts

Four contracts, no owner, no admin keys, no upgrades.

• GOL: an ERC-20 with a fixed supply of one billion, a 1% fee on transfers outside the game, and a locked deployer.
• Game: worlds, draws, plays, payouts, claims, the vault, and minting.
• Cards: the ERC-1155 pattern cards and their art.
• Pieces: the ERC-721 collection and its art.

Draws depend on a Chainlink VRF subscription funded with ETH by the team. It is the one thing in the system with an owner: if it runs dry, draws stop until it is topped up, and any draw caught in the gap can be reclaimed after 24 hours. Everything else runs without anyone.

Addresses appear here once the game is live.

How it goes live

The launch is a fixed sequence, and every step of it leaves a trace on chain that anyone can check.

1. Deploy. One script deploys GOL, Game, Cards and Pieces, wires them together, marks the game exempt from the trade fee, and moves the reserve, the tick fund and the launch fund into the game. World 1 and the 15 day launch window start in that block. The token creates its Uniswap V2 pair as it deploys.
2. Randomness. The game is added as a consumer on a Chainlink VRF subscription funded with ETH. Draws do not work before this.
3. Liquidity. The deployer adds GOL and ETH to the Uniswap V2 pair. This is the only time the deployer ever sends GOL to the pair.
4. Lock. The deployer calls the token's lock. From then on it can only fund the game or burn: no sells, no liquidity changes, no transfers to other wallets. The lock is one way and there is no key that reopens it.
5. Site and keeper. The page is pointed at the contracts, and a keeper starts calling the tick every 30 minutes. Anyone else can call it too and earn the tick reward.

Verify it yourself: read locked() on the token, check that exempt() is true only for the game, and confirm the deployer's transactions to the pair all sit before the lock. The Chainlink subscription and the liquidity position are the two things the team keeps control of.

Fairness and bots

Anyone can automate transactions on a public chain, so the rules are built so that automation buys no edge a normal player lacks. Chainlink picks every card. Cells land after the payout and face a step before earning, so nothing can be sniped in at the last moment. Payouts are per cell, so a large wallet earns in proportion to what it paid and never more. Carried cells cannot win a second Crown. Plays are capped per tick and per world. Splitting money across wallets gets around the caps, but each wallet then competes for the Crown on its own and every card still costs GOL.

Before you play

Every draw sends 12.5% of your GOL to nowhere, 5% to the pieces and 2.5% to the team, and every trade pays 1%. The rest goes into a pot that pays whoever stays alive, which may not be you. A card can be worth less than you paid. A piece's vault share is a floor only for as long as the vault holds GOL, and it is not a guaranteed resale value. GOL itself can lose all value. Draws depend on Chainlink VRF being funded and responsive. The contracts have tests and an internal review but no outside audit yet. Do not play with money you need.