The original ruleset devised by John Conway in 1970, it's what "Conway's Game of Life" refers to by default. Balances growth and decay closely enough to produce gliders, oscillators, and stable structures.

Identical to Life except cells are also born with 6 neighbors. That single extra birth condition introduces a self-replicating pattern (the "replicator"), which doesn't exist in standard Life.

Cells are born with exactly 2 neighbors, and no cell ever survives. This makes for chaotic, explosive growth with no stable or oscillating structures, since nothing persists more than one step.

Cells are born with just a single neighbor, causing patterns to sprawl outward aggressively from even the smallest seed. Sparse, spindly growth rather than the denser blobs typical of other rulesets.

Symmetric between "on" and "off" states, swapping live and dead cells in any pattern produces the same behavior. Produces sprawling, symmetric growth and is one of the few rulesets where negative space matters as much as the live cells.

No survival condition at all, so cells never live past one generation, only births from 2, 3, or 4 neighbors. Generates intricate, lace-like, fractal-style patterns rather than moving or oscillating structures.

Survival happens at any neighbor count, meaning live cells never die. Growth only ever accumulates, producing coral-like, ever-expanding structures that never shrink or stabilize.

Named for producing unusually long-lived oscillators and slow-evolving patterns compared to standard Life, with births requiring a denser neighborhood (3-5 neighbors) and a narrow survival window (exactly 5).

Named for supporting spaceships that behave like "pushed" objects, sparse birth/survival conditions (3,6,8 births; 2,4,5 survival) generate a small zoo of ships and puffers distinct from Life's. Useful for movement-based pattern engineering.