While We’re Here is live on the App Store today. It’s a conversation card game for iPhone and iPad — you draw a card, ask the question out loud, and see where the table goes. Twenty-five of the hundred cards are free.
Here’s how it got started, including the part most launch posts leave out: somebody else’s product showed me it would work.
The deck that started it
A while back I came across Not Just Sundays, a physical deck of faith-and-life conversation cards — 150 cards across three levels, plus wildcards, made by an independent creator. I’m not affiliated with them in any way. I just think the idea is right.
What the deck gets right is the hardest part, and it isn’t the questions. It’s giving somebody permission. Nobody at a dinner table wants to be the person who says “so what are you actually afraid of right now?” out of nowhere. But if a card says it, the card is the one being awkward, and everyone else gets to answer. That’s the whole mechanic. If you want the tactile version — cards you can spread on an actual table, no screens involved — go buy theirs. It’s a genuinely good product and a deck does some things an app never will.
Why I built an app instead of buying more cards
Because the moments I kept missing weren’t at a set-up table.
They were in the car on the way back from Corpus. Waiting in a parking lot for a small group where only three of us had shown up yet. A Tuesday night with Dora after the kids went down, when neither of us had the energy to start a real conversation but both of us wanted one. In none of those moments was a box of cards within reach. My phone always was.
So the design goal wasn’t “digitize a deck.” It was: what can a phone do here that cardboard can’t?
Three things, it turns out.
It remembers. A physical deck doesn’t know you already asked that question in March. While We’re Here tracks what your group has played, skipped, and favorited, and steers you toward cards you haven’t seen. You can also stop in the middle of a session and pick it up weeks later, right where you were.
It’s yours to write in. The built-in questions are a starting point, not the product. You can write your own cards for the people actually sitting with you, organize them into named decks, and export them to share with someone else. That’s the part I use most.
It knows when to go deeper. Many cards hide an optional follow-up question that stays hidden until somebody taps for it. A printed card has to commit — either the follow-up is on it or it isn’t. The app lets the group decide, at the table, whether they’re ready for the second layer. That single interaction is the thing I’m proudest of.
What’s actually in it
- 100 original questions across four decks: Life & Laughter, Faith & Questions, People We Love, and Gratitude & Prayer
- Optional follow-ups on many cards, revealed on tap
- Custom cards and named decks, with export
- Offline — once you’re set up, the cards and your writing work with no signal
- No account, no login, no ads. There’s no server behind this app. What you write stays on your device.
- 25 cards free plus 3 custom cards. The full library is one payment, once — $9.99 in the U.S., no subscription, and it includes cards I add later.
The honest disclaimer
Since I’ve named them twice: Not Just Sundays is a physical card deck made by someone else. While We’re Here is not their app, not licensed by them, not endorsed by them, and not a digital copy of their deck. Their questions are theirs. The hundred questions in my app are mine, written for my own table.
I’m saying that plainly because the alternative — quietly building an adjacent product and never mentioning where the idea came from — is how most of this industry works, and I don’t love it. Somebody else proved the category to me. That’s worth writing down.
And if what you actually want is cards on a table with the phones face-down in the middle, that’s a real preference and the deck is the better answer. The app is for the other eighty percent of moments, the ones you didn’t plan for.
Try it
While We’re Here on the App Store →
Twenty-five cards, free, no account. Take it to one dinner and see if the table stays at the table.
There’s also a page here on the site with the full feature list, pricing, support and the privacy policy.
More than small talk. More than Sunday.