Hmm, wow. This is ambitious in the sense of trying to get a fun game out of a difficult concept. If you manage, that could be pretty interesting.
I see three different possible ways to set up the core gameplay loop of the game:
-Puzzle game: the player has to think carefully about the consequences of every move they make, by working through the GoL rules.
-Like a causal RL, faster paced: how exactly the game will respond to the player's action does not really matter. The GoL rules are essentially a random number generator with visible state. The player takes actions quickly, bashes through the living blocks, mostly probably removing more than adding them, and dodges the formations that move towards them. They will hopefully gain some intuition as to how to react to a particular formation but they can survive without it. It's like Space Invaders except the invaders move in highly complex patterns, multiplying and disappearing.
-Like a traditional RL: combination of the above two. The game is not a series of carefully set up puzzles, it's a collection of primitives like blocks and gliders which the player learns straightforward rules to deal with. After a short learning period the player makes decisions quickly much of the time, but in tricky situations they stop and think, working through the GoL rules to figure out what to do.
From your description I'm not sure whether you were going for #1 or #3, but probably #1? I personally would go for #3 as otherwise it's a puzzle game (isn't it meant to be a RL?), and in my experience playing with GoL in that way gets tedious.
Good luck!