Progress they can see
Every finished quest moves an XP bar, adds gold, and edges them toward the next level. The reward is immediate and it is visible.
Chores, but worth doing.
Oakward turns the dishes, the laundry, and the trash into quests worth real XP and real gold. Your kids build a hero. You approve the work. Everybody stops arguing about the chore chart.
Private beta. Oakward is in TestFlight now, with Android close behind.
Works offline
One shared family account
Parent PIN on everything
No ads, ever
Why it works
A sticker chart your kid actually opens
Chore apps usually fail for the same reason: nothing happens when a kid finishes something. Oakward borrows the loop that keeps them glued to their games, and points it at the laundry basket.
You are still the judge
Nothing pays out until a parent approves it. A rushed job gets sent back, and kids learn fast that the standard is real.
Built for siblings
Shared family XP, a shared savings vault, streaks, and the occasional boss the whole house has to gang up on.
How it works
Four steps, about twenty minutes
Set it up once on a Sunday afternoon. After that it mostly runs itself.
Write the quests
Turn a chore into a quest in the Quest Workshop. Set the XP, the gold, and how often it repeats. Save the good ones to your library and reuse them forever.
Make the heroes
Each kid gets a hero with a class, a look, and a photo if they want one. Assign quests to one hero or to the whole roster at once.
They do the work
Kids see their own quest list on their own device, mark things done, and send them in. If the job is genuinely not happening, they can request a skip instead of lying about it.
You approve, it pays
Completions land in Approval Hall. Approve and the XP, gold, and streak credit hit instantly. Send it back and nothing does.
Inside Oakward
Everything your household runs on
Eight rooms, one family account, synced across every device you connect.
The Quest Workshop
Where chores become quests. Write it once, price it in XP and gold, and decide whether it happens today, every day, or on a schedule you set.
- A reusable quest library so you never retype "unload the dishwasher"
- Daily subscriptions that create exactly one assignment per kid per day
- Assign to one hero or to several in a single tap
- Optional helper prompts so younger kids know what "clean" means
Approval Hall
The part that makes the whole thing honest. Submitted quests queue up for you, and nothing is paid out until you say so.
- Approve, deny, or approve with no reward for a half finished job
- A no reward skip request for the days a quest truly is not possible
- Reward redemptions queue here too, so nothing gets cashed in behind your back
- Every decision is written to a permanent ledger you can scroll back through
Rewards and real world privileges
Gold has to buy something. You decide what. Screen time, a movie night, choosing dinner, a trip to the shop, whatever actually motivates your kid.
- Build your own reward shop with your own prices and photos
- Level rewards that unlock automatically or wait for your approval
- One time treats or repeatable standbys
- A backpack where kids hold what they have bought until they want to use it
Streaks and the daily prize wheel
Finish your daily quest bundle and you bank a spin. Spins pile up, so a kid who has a great week gets to sit down on Saturday and burn through five of them at once.
- Day streaks with freeze tokens, because a sick day should not wipe out a month
- Prize segments you configure yourself, from gold to essence to a free reward
- Daily bundles you tune per kid so the bar is fair across ages
- A weekly leaderboard for households where that helps and not the ones where it does not
The Family Vault
A shared pot with a shared goal on it. Kids deposit their own gold toward a family trip, a pizza night, a new game for the house, and they earn family XP for doing it.
- Set a goal and a target, and watch the bar fill from everyone at once
- Withdrawal requests come to you for approval
- Full deposit and withdrawal history
- Quietly teaches saving without a single lecture about saving
Health, potions, and gentle consequences
Heroes have health. You can dock a little for the lights left on all night, and they can spend their own gold on a potion to get it back. Consequences land without a shouting match.
- Record health events with a reason your kid can read later
- Three potion tiers, priced however you want them priced
- At zero health a hero has to recover before submitting new quests
- You can always just heal them, and sometimes that is the right call
Family progress
Your household levels up as a unit. Approved quests feed a shared family XP pool, so the eight year old scrubbing a sink is contributing to the same number as everyone else.
- Family level, family XP, and a family mission statement you write together
- Streaks, achievements, and a top contributor board
- An immutable ledger of every XP, gold, health, and reward change
Parent Command
One PIN protected screen that holds the levers. Kids can hand you the phone, or use their own, and none of this is reachable from their side.
- A 4 to 8 digit parent PIN you can change at any time
- Device manager: approve each kid's phone or tablet and bind it to exactly one hero
- Award or deduct XP, gold, essence, spins, potions, and rewards by hand when life happens
- Family time zone, data reset tools, and a full factory reset if you want to start clean
For the big weekends
Summon a boss before company comes over
Spring cleaning is a hard sell. A boss is not. Pick one from the bestiary, attach the quests that actually need doing, and every completion in the house takes a chunk out of its health bar. The kids are on the same team for once, and the garage gets cleared out.
Sunscale Dragon Warden384 / 620 HP
Only a parent in Parent Command can summon or call off a boss.
The long game
Essence, the Armory, and a pet that grows
Gold gets spent on real life. Essence is the other currency, and it goes into the parts of the game that keep a kid coming back after the novelty of week one has worn off.
The Armory
Seven character lines across warrior, royal, mystic, guardian, tinker, adventure, and frontier, each with ten tiers of art to work toward.
The Pet Shop
Dragons, wolves, owls, pegasi, and hippogriffs. Find one, feed it essence, and watch it evolve through ten stages beside your hero.
You set the rates
Essence earn rates and shop prices are yours to tune in Parent Command. If a kid is levelling too fast, turn the dial down.
From the households
What mornings look like now
My seven year old set an alarm. On a Saturday. I have never once seen that kid get out of bed early for anything that was not Christmas, and now he is downstairs feeding the dog at seven because it is worth forty gold and he is two quests off a spin. I keep waiting for the novelty to wear off. Six weeks in, no sign of it.
I set this up fully expecting to spend the next month nagging them about the app instead of the chores. That is not what happened.
The approval step is what sold me. She marks the bathroom done, it goes in a queue, and I actually walk in and look at it before I tap anything. Took about two weeks for her to work out that a rushed job gets bounced back. She stopped rushing them. That is the whole thing, right there.
I am raising my grandson and I am not a gaming person even slightly, so I went in worried the whole thing would be over my head. It took me about twenty minutes. He picked a wizard, I typed in the list of things I actually need help with around here, and that was that.
Fourteen year old. Way too cool for the paper chart on the fridge, would not go near it. Then his little brother started stacking up gold and something in him just snapped, and now he is checking the leaderboard over breakfast. Sibling rivalry turns out to be a hell of a feature.
We set the vault goal to a weekend at the coast and told the kids they could put in whatever gold they wanted. My oldest has dropped in nearly half her balance. This is a kid who had never in her life thought about saving for anything, and now she brings up the goal at dinner.
Two weeks in and the morning argument is simply gone. I do not know how else to put it.
The boss battles are the thing my kids ask for by name. All three of them working off the same list, watching the health bar drop together, and for about four days our house is spotless. I summon one before my in laws visit and I am not sorry about it.
Sample copy while our private beta runs. These cards will carry real, attributed quotes from beta families at launch.
Pricing
One subscription, the whole household
Every hero, every device, every feature. There is no per child upsell and there are no ads, because an app your kid opens every morning is not a place to sell them anything.
Oakward
$4.99 / month
Cancel any time from the App Store.
- Unlimited heroes and quests
- Every device in the house
- Cloud sync and backup
- Boss battles, wheel, vault, armory
- No ads and no in app purchases
Oakward
$39.99 / year
Works out at about $3.33 a month.
- Everything in the monthly plan
- Two months free against monthly
- Locked in at your signup rate
- Priority support from a human
- Beta families keep launch pricing
Beta access is free while we are in TestFlight.
Questions
The things parents ask first
What ages is Oakward actually for?
It lands best somewhere around five to fourteen. Younger kids respond to the art, the pet, and the wheel. Older ones care about gold, the reward shop, and beating their sibling on the leaderboard. You can tune the XP, gold, and difficulty per hero, so a six year old and a thirteen year old can share the same house without either one feeling cheated.
Do my kids need their own phones?
No. Oakward works fine as a single shared device that lives on the kitchen counter, with a parent PIN keeping the controls locked. If your kids do have devices, you can approve each one in the Device Manager and bind it to exactly one hero, so they see only their own quests and their own gold.
Does it need a connection to work?
Oakward is local first. The app runs off a database on the device, so quests, approvals, and rewards all work on a plane or in a dead zone. When you come back online it syncs the family account, and any writes that were queued go up then.
What do you do with our data?
We collect what the app needs to run your family account and nothing else. There is no advertising, no ad identifiers, and nothing is sold to anybody. Kids do not create accounts of their own; parents create heroes. The full detail is in the privacy policy.
Can I run this without paying my kids real money?
Yes, and most families do. Gold is in game currency and it buys whatever you put in your reward shop. Plenty of households never attach a dollar to it at all: gold buys screen time, picking the movie, staying up an extra half hour, or choosing what is for dinner on Friday. If you would rather it map to an allowance, you can do that instead.
What if a kid games the system?
Nothing pays out without your approval, so the ceiling on cheating is low. Beyond that, every XP, gold, health, and reward change is written to a ledger you can read back, and Parent Command lets you deduct as easily as you award. If somebody claims they cleaned a room they did not clean, you find out at the approval step and it costs them.
How do I get into the beta?
Email us and we will send you a TestFlight invite. We are keeping the group small on purpose so we can actually read and act on what people tell us. Android is in progress and beta families will be first onto it.
Who makes Oakward?
Redmont Labs, a small independent studio. Oakward started as a fix for one household's chore problem and grew from there. Questions and complaints reach a person, not a ticket queue: info@redmontlabs.com.
Open the door
Oakward is in private beta on TestFlight. Send us a note with how many kids you have and roughly what ages, and we will get you an invite.
Free during beta. Android is next.