CardForge started because I kept running out of conversation.
Not in a sad way. You know how it goes. You're sitting with people, the small talk runs dry, and everybody reaches for a phone. I thought it would be useful to have a card on the table with a question on it. Something to get people going again.
Then I had to decide what the questions were going to be about, so I picked a subject I actually care about. History. Put the two together and you get historical conversation cards. Then I decided I'd rather build a business than a hobby, and here we are.
That order matters, because it's why these aren't trivia cards. Trivia ends a conversation. Somebody knows the answer, somebody doesn't, next card, and nobody's said anything. That's exactly the problem I was trying to solve, so I built the opposite.
Every card carries a question with no answer printed anywhere, because there isn't one. You get the facts first, on the back, and then the question comes at you sideways off what you just read. Washington refused a salary for eight years and handed his commission back when he could have kept it. So what does a man like that want? You can argue that at a table for twenty minutes and nobody has to be wrong.
The other thing that fell out of building it this way surprised me. A person doesn't get one question. They get a different question in every set they appear in, because a person is genuinely different depending on who's standing next to them. Washington on his own set is one man. Washington on Lafayette's set, seen by a homesick nineteen year old fighting an ocean from home, is somebody else entirely.
I make every set by hand and I don't print anything I can't back up. That part I'll write about another time, because it's a longer story and some of it is uncomfortable.
Loretta