How it works

There's no drawing from scratch. Each icon is a small change to an existing one, so every icon has a parent, and every family grows from one of the ancestors the operator prepared.

• Pick any icon except one you evolved yourself, or its child or grandchild — at least three other people evolve a line between your turns. Other branches stay open.
• Once published, the drawing is fixed: it's a record that others build on. Its name and tags can still be edited.

On a 16×16 icon you repaint 4–12 pixels. Too few or too many and it can't be published.

• You can also make one bonus change: the palette, the dot shape, or shifting/mirroring the whole drawing.
• A line that just changed its palette keeps it for the next two generations, so families stay recognizable. A new species' children may always change it.
• Spacing is free to change any time.
• Keep at least 40 pixels painted, so a line can't be erased away.
• Tags carry on from the parent: add one, or swap one for another (up to 8). Like names, a new tag uses only letters, hiragana and katakana, at least one kana or two letters, and up to 20 letters (a kana counts as two).

A new icon waits a little before anyone can evolve it — 30 minutes at first, doubling every two generations as a line drifts from where it began (4 hours just before a milestone).

• Each new species starts the count again, though every species after the first waits twice as long as the one before, so a family slows as it goes. Generation 64 — the 8th new species' — is the last: the family's story ends there.
• Each child an icon has doubles the wait for its next one, so lines grow deeper rather than wider.
• Waiting? Evolve an icon further down the same line — there's usually a tip that's open.
• One person can evolve up to 3 icons in any 6 hours, so no one fills the trees alone. In between, favorite the icons you like or join a vote.

Every 8 generations a line reaches a milestone. When the first icon gets there, its close relatives — everything below its great-grandparent — face a vote.

• For 2 days, anyone can evolve more relatives up to the milestone to join the vote. Meanwhile the waits in the branch are the same however deep it is.
• After 3 days, the crowd's favorite becomes a new species. A tie, or no votes, goes to the first one there.
• The rest of those relatives go extinct: they can no longer be evolved, and the story carries on in the new species.
• Each species gets a family tree of its own. Together they make the lineage tree.

Like scientists naming a find long after it was discovered, the new species is named by the people who evolve on from it.

• The person who evolved the new species can propose too — when they made it, its name had to end in the old species name.
• So can everyone who evolved in the branch while the species vote took candidates — the candidates that lost included.
• Each of them can propose one name — letters, hiragana or katakana, 2 to 20 letters (a kana counts as two). Anyone can vote, once.
• Its current name (cut to fit that length) is a candidate from the start. Up to 8 names in all, first come, first served.
• After 3 days, the top name becomes the species name for it and everything below it.
• A tie at the top goes to the name proposed first. No votes at all — and its current name becomes the species name.

• My record remembers the icons you evolved in this browser and tells you how far others have carried them since.
• Every icon's page replays its whole line, and you can share the replay as a GIF.