I think SmoothLife and Lenia are great fun -- lots of highly watchable "eye candy" tends to get produced by those types of experiments. The better you get at running experiments, the more new behavior you can turn up:

  https://www.youtube.com/c/Slackermanz

There's a channel on the ConwayLife Lounge on Discord called "#exotic-ca" that's devoted to these kinds of explorations. I just simply haven't had time to dig into those topics much, but if I could clone myself I'd definitely assign one copy to playing around with that kind of thing.