"What if the name is already being used?" Topic

nowadays almost every good name has been used. what if your rules took a name that already been used? like Warhammer. if i named my rule "Titan Combat:Warhammer"， is that ok?

No it is not OK. It could cost you all of your income from the product plus a lot of legal costs.

It depends on whether the name is registered. I expect that Games Workshop have registered Warhammer as a trademark for games and computer games. If they have, you cannot use it.

Even if they have not, you could be accused of "passing off", which is a form of copying and Games Workshop could sue you for damages. Worse still, if they win, you may have to pay their costs.

Games Workshop employ a team of lawyers so they WILL come after you if they decide it is worthwhile.

Be patient, you will think of a name not yet used. If you choose a name which is too derivative it might increase sales or convince folk that you are un-original.
Of course it might be your intent to associate your book with something in which case you might want to "hint".

Warslammer?

HarWammer?

Warscammer?

vtsao for the win!

Titles may be Trademarked but they cannot be copyrighted. So you need to check the trademark status of the word/title you want to use.

However, I will disagree with your main point. Wargame titles are amazingly UNORIGINAL and very *few* good ones have been used.

+1 for Extra Crispy. I Originally called my wwii game Retroboom (I liked it, and it's definitely not cliche…) but all my friends hated it. I thought, well, maybe theres a dumb cliche name I can find. I started searching "Hail of Fire" (which they liked much more) and was stunned there wasn't another game already using it.

So yes, there are tons of good original (as well as dumb an cliche) names available for you to use.

Seems inconceivable to me that you'd 'want' to re-use a name, however good you think the other name would be. How would you go about building up your own goodwill, avoid driving potential customers to the other ruleset, avoid associations with an inferior set etc? So what Martin and EC said on the name front – it shouldnt really be that difficult to pick an original title.

What Mick said on the legals. If someone has registered the name as a TM then they *have* to defend it (or they risk losing it) so someone will come after you with a C&D.

If its unregistered then you're in passing off territory – whilst its difficult to enforce that, if the other IP owner is active then at best you're just going to someone off (and it's back to that 'how do you differentiate?' point so that your PR efforts/spend aren't benefitting the other business) an at worst you end up in a long running, time wasting, dispute over something as pointless as choice of name.

Warhamster.

We can make this the wargamer's equivalent of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest

My entry:
Song of De BellisHammer Quest.

miniMo

Warhammer in particular is also a common term that preceded the game. You may actually be able to get away with using it in a game name that included the term – but even if you could I would guess the legal fees on even a successful defense of the term would be prohibitive.

An interesting precedent may be the legal wrangling between Apple the computer company and Applecore the company the Beatles came up with.

"The Art of War" is venerable. We "stole" it…………

Some of my less stellar attempts at originality:

Gold and Gore.
The Art of Fantasy Warfare.
Questing Beasties.

Check the trademark status. In some cases they have lapsed. For example several SPI titles have been used for more recent board games and miniature rules. An active system you should stay away from. A lot of systems out there that you do not even know about. So it may be touchy.

I've had to rename projects at the last moment because I realise it shared the name with a 20 year old RPG supplement or something.

In the end, it's not us on a forum that have to be convinced, it's the judge when the lawyers come for every dime your company made.

All these funky names are just plain confusing. We should go back to "Rules for the 18th century period, written by xxxx".

That's enough information right there.

Hamwars

warmallett

Bellis Bludgeon!

Warwallet…

Kriegshammer? WHat with the faux-German thing and all.

Trademark is also for area. So for example if you had the trademark for "Warhammer" for games, you could get one for "Warhammer" for Socks, or After shave, theoretically.

But As Exrra Crispy notes most titles are completely unimaginative relying for sensationalism to try and sell the rules. Far more effective might be simpler titles.

Like

How to play Space Wargames.

Adventures among the Stars.

The Romance of War Games in the 18th Centry

Knighthood with Dragons and Damsels in distress thrown in.

Wargamers buy rules I believe, by how much fun they think they will be and what they include for you to go through. I design games and write rules and professionally print them, but I don't sell them. Thus I can do pretty much what I want. I also design games to have a specific slant or "take" on the period and I try and make them evocative of that.

My Ancient Rules for the archaic ancient period (before the Greeks) are "Honey I sacrificed the Kids." My rules for the Greeks and Roman period are "Mardonius' Lament." and so on. "Oh God Anything but a SIX! for the musket period and in the modern, from WWI to WWII are "The Shattered Century." My American Civil War rules are "Magnolia's Mint Juleps N' Gritz."

Besides here is nothing to prevent you from using a generic category like "War Games." Others have done it besides Featherstone.

I won't even stop to look over a rule book with a title like an old Batman caption "War Berserker" or something like that, but I would stop and look if it had a title like "A pleasant way to spend a Saturday Afternoon playing with little toy soldiers with my friends. "

The OP's point about all the good titles being taken is valid, I think.
Avalon Hill came out with the very first game on the topic, Battle of the Bulge, in 1965. It's still a fun game. Then SPI did Bastogne, a horrible horrible game, in the magazine. That pretty well ties up the main recognizable titles. But that didn't stop bosrdgsmes on that subject. Oh no.
AH did one or two revisions, keeping the name. None as much fun as original, but I digress.
As pointed out above, you cant copyright a title. But it's just as well not to use the same title yo avoid confusion.

So, every time someone thought they had a new idea for a game on the Bulge, they tried to come up with an unused title. Not easy. Popular subject, lots of games.
I don't think "Sturm nach der Ardennes zum der Meuse" has been used yet.

As a parody of all the titles with Sword, Steel, Flames, Fire, etc in the title, I've named my pile of notes Flames of Liberty. I hope nobody uses it in the meantime.

WarBacon

Yes, coming up with an original name can be fun. It took me a couple years to come up with a name that I liked for a fictional RPG fan mag (for use in a novel that will probably never be finished.) I'd come up with a name, then look it up on the 'net (only to have hopes dashed.) My advice is to make a looong list, then go through it one by one… ;-)

I don't think every good name has been used. There are more terrible names than good names out there in my opinion, and I don't think it is because all the good names are used, I just think too many rules writers are terrible at marketing. Using any variant of Warhammer in your title is just pure lazy, sure it's a great name. Think of another one. THAT being said, I think anybody can put out a game entitled "battle of the bulge" if that is the subject matter, but it would make sense to call it something so it can be differentiated from all the others like "SPIs Battle of the Bulge" or "Kevin Zucker's Bastogne".

Thank you all, of course, i will not use the name warhammer. that's just an exsample. But i do found some free rules before use the same name.

Guys, I don't know the legalities. Does anyone else really KNOW that someone can block a rules title? For instance, you can't copyright or trademark a book title, which is why there are at least three books titled Glory Road--Heinlein, Catton and I forget the third--and I believe the same is true for movie titles.

But even if there were no legal impediment, I would not recommend using the title of a set still well known, in print and being played.

Robert – If it comes to legal matters, the question is whether a reasonable person could confuse the two products.

'Lighting War' has been used for at least three different sets of rules, by different authors.

I'd just avoid anything which goes near large, litigious corporations with teams of lawyers. So no Marvel, Star Wars, Hasbro, GW….

Even SPI didn't dare take on Star Wars, hence 'Freedom in the Galaxy' but it would have been so much better if the characters had had their actual names.

The short answer would be if that a particular name is important, engage a lawyer with trademark expertise, get them to do a search for you, and let them suggest whether it is viable or suggest non-violating alternatives. If you can't afford the expense of a lawyer, you can't afford to use a name that you know might be an issue.

How about going with alliteration?
Dungeons & Dragons did spawn Tunnels & Trolls, Villains & Vigilantes, Drakar och Demoner (tough one to translate), Starships and Spacemen, Bunnies and Burrows (my girlfriend was a "Watership Down" fan girl).

You can follow the same route in war games. WWII would give you Shermans & Stu's, Grunts & Grenadiers, M4 & PzIV. Hmmm, this just might work for other eras like AWI to Nap – Minute Men to Marshall's…

Nope. I need to up my medication. NURSE!

Warsaw…….

Oooops, that one's taken too.

;-)

Warball-peenhammer

Warclawhammer

Many other hammer iterations here:

link

I'm particularly enamored with Wardead-blowhammer.

M4 & PzIV is an example of alliteration?!

For a 'universal' set of rules, how about Us And Them?
Or, for American gamers, US And Them!

Alliterations?

That's so 70s and 80s!

Well, War at Sea was taken by a TV series so I didn't use it. But some other company did.

You could go with made up names like new drugs use. Hammer hammer hammer.