Benjamin Dalthur Holt

Hey there, I’m Benjamin. I’m a small business owner living in Denmark. I am a board game enthusiast and my wife, and I have built a business that finds high quality and rare board games to sell to the public.

My fascination with games started when I was 6 years old, and I got a Lego Chess pc game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_Chess.

I could talk a lot about this game but in a nutshell, it was colourful and cheerful with cute animations. If you had placed 6-year-old me in front of a normal chess set and tried to teach me the rules, I would not have lasted 5 minutes. But the pc game was so exciting that I stuck around long enough to eventually get a grasp of the rules. A fascination with video and board games was born!

While growing up I was part of a chess club and I attended a lot of chess tournaments, but I was eventually pitted against seniors and a single game could last for hours which quickly killed my interest in chess. Video games took over and I played an ungodly amount every week. I got so good at it that I was able to live off E-sport (mainly League of Legends) in my mid-twenties. I was working 80+ hours a week and it was not good for my mental health. My girlfriend (now wife) was oddly supportive of this whole adventure, but after we got our first daughter, I eventually realized that I had to quit as I could not be good at e-sport while also being a good father.

I still enjoyed games though, and I needed something to fill the void. Originally, I wanted to play chess with my wife, but she didn’t even know the rules and I had played it since I was 6 so that was a bit optimistic. We turned to other board games instead, starting with the cliché: Monopoly. Monopoly is hated by many board game enthusiasts because it isn’t a very good game, but it is great for beginners as everyone can learn to play it, which probably explains its popularity. We played it a lot over a few weeks and moved on to some new board games, Agricola, Splendor and Carcassonne. Best decision we ever made! It filled my gaming void without all the negative side effects of e-sport.

Fast forward a few years our board game collection had grown quite a bit and the corona pandemic hit us forcing us to stay home a whole lot, more time for board games! Because of this, board games were no longer just a hobby of ours it was turning into a lifestyle. We then decided to turn this lifestyle into a business as well and that’s how “Oaken Vault” was born.