A hundred firsts. One story at a time.
Every question is about the first time you did something, for a table where the food has already arrived.
An iPhone app. Free to start. The whole deck, $9.99, once.Your first pet, and the name you gave it.
The first thing you believed for way too long.
The first text you sent to entirely the wrong person.
Read it out. Everyone answers in one sentence, you included. Then the deck draws who tells the whole story, and you pass the phone left.
That is all of it. Nobody gets cornered, nobody has to perform, and the quiet end of the table gets the same ten seconds as the loud one. Once you have told a story you are out of the draw until everyone has told one. Three follow-ups sit under every question for whoever gets drawn.
The Read turns it around. The deck picks one person and shows the card, and everyone else says what they think that person is going to answer, out loud, before the person answers. It is a test of how well the table knows each other, and the wrong guesses are funnier than the true answer.
Then there is The Blind. Everyone types one sentence with the phone turned away. It shuffles them and reads them back in handwriting, one at a time, and the table guesses who. Then the name comes up.
When one lands, keep it.
One tap makes a card with the question, the artwork, and who it was for. It saves to your phone like a photograph. Send it to the person who was not there.
It is the only thing that ever leaves the table. No account, no analytics, and nothing you type goes anywhere but the phone in your hand.
Made at a table in Charleston.
Andrew Cebulka has photographed food, and the people who cook and serve it, for twenty years. Hundred Firsts began as a way to get past the weather at his own dinners. The questions, the follow-ups, and the artwork are his.
Andrew Cebulka
Photographer, Charleston
iPhone. Free to start, with thirty-six of the firsts and every way to play. The whole deck is one purchase, $9.99, and nothing else, ever. Coming to the App Store. Write if you want to hear when, once.
A printed deck is in the works. A small numbered run. Same address.
The first thing you saved up for that turned out to be junk.
Open in the App StoreNot live yet. The food is getting cold either way.