The Oaken Almanac: Year in Review
Every adventure begins with a spark—and in this case, it lit in a small apartment in Ringsted, shared by a couple and their two-year-old daughter. Just a small family, a shared love of board games, and an increasing interest in grand games usually only found on Kickstarter.
Back then, there were no grand plans. No café. No pricing structure. No curated catalogue of award-winning titles. Just a simple idea: what if we could support our hobby and get games a bit cheaper by jumping on those occasional “retailer pledges” we spotted on Kickstarter?
The logic was beautifully naive:
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Back a game at retailer level.
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Keep one copy.
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Sell the rest.
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Cover the cost of our own.
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Repeat.
The company was officially founded in October 2021, making this first “year” only three months long. It was kickstarted—quite literally—by selling off a few stocks. That decision was deeply personal: a bit of seed money drawn from years of investing, combining a love of economic systems with the fantasy of finally creating something tangible.
And really, we’d both always had a bit of a merchant fantasy.
For as long as we could remember, the idea of “being merchants” had lingered in the background. Running a little shop. Trading goods. Curating things worth sharing. We just never knew what to sell. Not until board games entered our lives.
We had a climate-controlled attic that was perfect for storing the overflow. This wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a small, self-sustaining side project. But... we’re perfectionists. So instead of throwing up a basic storefront, we spent far too much time building a beautiful, polished webshop that far outscaled the humble operation we had in mind.
At the time, we thought it was literal perfection—a digital masterpiece. And to be fair, for two complete rookies, it really was impressively clean. But looking back now? We've since raised the bar to heights that 2021 us couldn’t have imagined. Let’s just say: if our first webshop were a modest village inn, today’s version is a fully fortified stronghold, complete with banners, mood lighting, and a suspiciously high number of secret rooms.
Once the site was finished, it felt wrong to only offer Kickstarter titles. Might as well add a few regular retail games too, right? That idea ran into a wall almost immediately.
Most distributors turned us away.
“You can’t buy games from us unless you’re already selling games—and ideally, selling them well.”
“...But how do we start selling games if we’re not allowed to buy any?”
It was a strange loop. Like trying to enter a tavern but needing to be a regular first.
Eventually, one company said yes. No minimums. No hesitation. Just trust. We still work with them to this day, and every order we place with them feels like a quiet nod to the beginning. They believed in us before anyone else did—and that trust has only deepened with time.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, we needed a name. A banner to fly over our little merchant operation. But this wasn’t one of those agonizing, back-and-forth brainstorming marathons. No list of ten finalists. No logo mood boards. Just one very normal shower, and one sudden moment of clarity.
“Oaken Vault.”
It just appeared.
The words came from nowhere, but sounded like... something. A mysterious vault in the woods. Maybe hidden inside a massive oak tree. The kind of place where you’d find interesting things. Ancient treasures. Lost relics. Things you wouldn’t stumble upon just anywhere.
That same day, the name was pitched.
“Oaken Vault?”
“Yep.”
“Good?”
“Very.”
And that was the end of that discussion.
In mid-December 2021, we got our first real shipment—a modest, complete pallet of games. Not towering as it might have been with a larger order, but still a thrilling milestone in our journey. Our doorbell rang, and there it was on the pavement.
We were visibly excited—almost embarrassingly so. Imagine two grown adults practically vibrating with joy at the sight of a pallet of cardboard boxes. We had to physically restrain ourselves from clapping our tiny little hands together like kids on Christmas morning. It was that kind of moment.
The delivery driver, meanwhile, just stood there—eyebrows slightly raised, watching the scene unfold like he’d stumbled into some kind of cult. He clearly had no idea—and certainly no interest—in what was inside. For him, it was just another drop-off. For us, it was our first. Our opening chapter.
As we signed for it and hauled the boxes inside, the realization hit:
“Wait… are we officially board game retailers now?”
Apparently, we were.
We just didn’t know how deep the Vault would go.
