I started playing Forest Shuffle this week on a whim, clicking into a game on Board Game Arena late one evening with no real plan beyond seeing what all the fuss was about. Every game I’ve played since has been there too, a laptop balanced on my knees, because my own copy is still somewhere between a warehouse and my front porch. I didn’t expect much from it. Card games about nature tend to arrive with lovely art and very little underneath it, and I assumed this would be another pleasant evening I’d forget by the weekend. Instead I’ve found myself thinking about it on the drive to work, rearranging an imaginary forest in my head, wondering whether the next tree I plant should be a beech or a linden and what I’d want living on its north side.

The game is simple to describe and strange to hold in your head. You plant trees in front of you, and each tree has four sides waiting to be filled: birds and squirrels in the canopy, mushrooms and hedgehogs at the roots, deer and butterflies and bats along the trunk. Most of the cards are split down the middle, half one creature and half another, so playing one means turning the other half under, giving it up. You pay for everything with other cards from your hand, and those cards don’t vanish. They go out into the clearing, where anyone in the game might take them. Somewhere in the deck the winters are waiting, yes winter is coming, and when the third one turns over, the forest is finished, whatever state it happens to be in.

What caught me, around my second game, was realizing that almost nothing in my forest scored on its own. The butterflies cared about the other butterflies. A creature on one tree wanted company of a certain kind on another. A card I’d played early and half forgotten suddenly mattered again because of something I added much later, three trees away. I would scroll back across the screen and see the whole thing differently than I had a minute before, the way a sentence changes meaning when you read the last word.

Marcus Aurelius wrote, in the seventh book of the Meditations, that “everything is interwoven, and the web is holy; none of its parts are unconnected. They are composed harmoniously, and together they compose the world.” I’ve carried that line around for years, mostly as a comfort, a reminder that the small irritations of a day belong to something larger than my reaction to them. I don’t think I ever felt it until I watched a little fire salamander I’d tucked at the base of a fir start to matter because of a card I placed two turns later, even if the cards were only pixels and the forest lived in a browser tab.

The Stoics believed the cosmos was rational all the way through, that the world was knit together by logos, and that a wise person’s work was to see that knitting clearly and act in step with it. Marcus wasn’t writing for an audience. He was writing to himself, an emperor on a cold frontier, trying to remember that the soldier, the senator, the plague and the river all belonged to one order. When he says none of the parts are unconnected, he means it as a discipline of attention. Look again, and you will find the thread.

That is what Forest Shuffle quietly asks of you. In the first game I played it like most card games, chasing the best card in front of me, taking what looked strongest and moving on. My forest was a pile of good animals that didn’t know each other. By the third game I was choosing a tree because of who might live in it later, keeping half a card in mind that I hadn’t drawn yet, giving up a lovely stag beetle because the bottom half of that card would make my oak make sense. The game rewards you for seeing relationships rather than objects, and it is surprisingly gentle about teaching that. It never tells you. It just keeps showing you that the forest you built in isolation scores worse than the one you built as a web.

There is a second thread in Marcus’s line that I keep circling back to, the word holy. He doesn’t say the web is useful, or efficient, or clever. He says it deserves reverence. I think that’s why the clearing moves me more than it probably should. Every card I spend to plant something goes out into the commons, and whoever is on the other end of the connection, a stranger in another time zone I’ll never meet, might build their own forest from what I let go. My choices feed theirs whether I intend it or not. The Stoics would say I am never only acting for myself, because I am a part of a larger body, a limb rather than a separate thing. Playing online makes that oddly vivid. I can’t see the other player’s face, only the cards I gave up turning their trees into vibrant forests.

And then the winters come. You can see them coming, the way you can see autumn in the trees in October, and still the third one always seems to arrive a turn earlier than you’d like. Your forest is never finished. Some tree always has an empty side, some creature is waiting in your hand with nowhere to go. Marcus wrote a great deal about that too, about how the work of a life ends when it ends, and how it’s no less whole for being interrupted. This sits a bit more heavy with me as I have a rescue dog that is coming upon his own Winter.

In the game the forest I’d made was already complete in its connections, even with a bare branch or several.

Last night I finished a game and didn’t close the tab right away. I just sat there for a minute looking at the trees laid out across the screen, a squirrel in the canopy of a oak, a toad at the roots of a birch, butterflies scattered along three trees that only made sense together. It looked like a small world, and it was mine for about another minute. Somewhere a box is on its way to me with all of these cards in it, and I keep thinking about the first time I’ll lay this forest out on a real table and feel the whole forest under my fingers.