Bowl of Life app for iPhone and iPad

Place eggs that will hatch cells by taping the colored eggs on the bottom left of the screen. The cells that hatch from these eggs will run and hide at first, but soon they will grow big enough to venture out into the mating and food zones.

-When in the mating zone, the cells will breed with other like colored cells. The exceptions are bad seeds and special blends.

-Special blends are a mixture of all colors and can produce unpredictable results. They also have tails that show how healthy and happy they are as they run from place to place.

-Bad seeds are much larger than the rest of the cells and take more food to fill. Besides getting in the way, they also will periodically drop drugs that will slow down the other cells and sometimes stop them entirely. Only the red and yellow males are able to absorb these and remove them from the field. These bulky cells spawn from brown eggs and will breed with any color, but their eggs occasionally will be black.

-Black eggs spawn viruses, and these may wreak havoc with your ecosystem. If you do not wish to have viruses spawn, this feature can be turned on and off with a button on the bottom right. This is beside a button that also allows you to spawn virus eggs onto the playing field. However, only four viruses can be on the screen at one time. Otherwise, they will self-destruct. Viruses will roam the field searching for victims, but they can also be controlled by touching the screen. They will follow your touch, and tapping them destroys them. If too many viruses are on the field at once, they may transmit the virus between themselves and quickly kill off the entire species, so be careful.

-On the right of the field is a cave that houses a predator. The predator will remain in the cave until it is hungry, at which point it will come out and hunt for food. It will eat any color, but bad seeds are the predators favorite. Touching and dragging bad seeds into the predators grasp can help to open up the field a bit more and free up some food for your cells.

-The cells will eat the crops that grow at the top right, but they also love to eat the puff berries that are released by the bushes. These berries will float around the field, ready for any cells to pick them up for lunch. If the crop gets low, tapping the bushes will make them quickly regrow.

-The game has an autosave feature that will periodically save your cells. When you return to the game, they will all re-hatch as new cells with the same traits.