How the Game of Roblox works

A 32 by 32 Conway board lives on the server. 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.

One coin and two things you hold. GOR 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. Join. Every new player starts with 30,000 GOR, enough for three draws.
2. Draw. Pick a quantity and press Draw. The cards flip over at once and land in your hand.
3. Play a card. Click it in your hand. It follows your cursor on the board as a green ghost. Press R to turn it. Click 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 on this site, which runs the same rules on a fast clock 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 or the server restarts.

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.

The world does not belong to a server. It lives in one DataStore key that every server reads and writes through atomic updates, so the world you join is the same world everywhere, and it keeps ticking while you are away.

Draws and cards

A draw costs 10,000 GOR, up to 10 at a time. The GOR is split at once: 80% to the pot, 12.5% burned, 5% to the vault, 2.5% to the house. The cards are rolled by the server and land in your hand immediately.

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 player 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 player 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 server 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 pays everything your squares earned since your last claim, plus any settled balance. There is no deadline, and a world that ends settles every square automatically, so nothing is ever stranded. The pot grows from draws and from a reserve that seeds every new world with 1,000,000 GOR.

Launch bonus

For the first 15 days after the game opens, 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's image is the fossil record of its world, drawn 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 your 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. 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 press the advance button once a tick is due and earn 2,000 GOR from a tick fund. If nobody does within 20 seconds, the server does it for free. If every server is empty, the next server to open catches the world up one tick per pass, so no tick is ever skipped and the schedule never drifts.

Where GOR comes from

Every new player starts with 30,000 GOR. After that there are three ways to get more: stay alive and claim your payouts, advance the world when a tick is due, or buy a pack with Robux. Supply is one billion, the same as the coin in the on-chain original, and every draw burns 12.5% of what it cost, so the number in circulation only falls.

GOR is not a currency. It cannot be sold, traded between players, or turned back into Robux, and it has no value outside the game.

Fairness and bots

The rules are built so that automation buys no edge a normal player lacks. The server rolls 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. One action at a time per player, checked on the server.

The on-chain original

This is the Roblox version of the Game of Life, a Conway game that lives in a contract on Ethereum. Every rule and every number here is the same one: the 32 by 32 board, the 24 tick world, the eleven cards and their odds, 4% of the pot each tick, 420 survivor pieces, the twenty share Crown, the same palettes and the same traits.

Three things differ, all because there is no chain and no gas. Draws reveal at once instead of waiting for Chainlink, so there is no reclaim rule for a draw that never answered. A world that ends settles every square into its owner's balance, so you never have to claim an old world. And GOR stays inside the game: there is no pool, no trading and no cash out.

Before you play

Every draw sends 12.5% of your GOR to nowhere, 5% to the pieces and 2.5% to the house. The rest goes into a pot that pays whoever stays alive, which may not be you. A card can be worth less than the draw that produced it. A piece's vault share is a floor only for as long as the vault holds GOR. GOR cannot be cashed out and Robux purchases are final. Play for the game, not for a return.