I have similar feelings to you about the fiddliness of games based on life. A few years back, it inspired me to build this as an experiment in unfiddly GoL play

I have similar feelings to you about the fiddliness of games based on life. A few years back, it inspired me to build this as an experiment in unfiddly GoL play: https://github.com/lharding/The-Automataic-Gardner https://github.com/lharding/The-Automataic-Gardner (warning: Processing. Been meaning to port it to JS forever now.)