How to Name Your Tabletop Game (+ Our Rejects!)
One of the most unexpected challenges we faced during the creation of Merchant Trails: The Silk Roads (free for newsletter subscribers here!) was deciding on its name.
While it seemed like a fairly simple task amidst everything else we had to do, it required many sessions of back-and-forth to finally settle on a name that felt just right.
As a small, close-knit team, our naming process can best be described as wild, unhinged ideation followed by several rounds of discussion and culling, based on considerations that we’ll detail in this blog post. As with any iterative process, even as old ideas were put aside new ideas would appear, and we ended up with a growing list of rejects that we thought would never see the light of day.
Until today.
We’ve decided to dredge up these sad, previously-culled rejects and tell you exactly why we rejected them – and what we learned about marketing tabletop games along the way!
Guiding Principles
Why put so much effort into a name? Your game’s name is an incredibly important part of its marketing, as it forms your audience’s first impression of the game. It also affects your company’s branding, and how people remember the games you create. This is especially important to consider if, like us, you’re a small game publisher that’s just starting out.
We knew that we would rely heavily on digital marketing, particularly social media marketing – where the nature of the platforms mean that you have mere seconds, if that, to leave an impression on your audience before your post or ad is swiped away.
While a large part of retaining the attention of your audience would lie in your visuals, your game’s name is also essential in forming that first impression.
With this in mind, we tried to answer these questions:
What information do you want your audience to take away from the name?
What kind of feeling do you want your game to convey?
For Merchant Trails, we wanted to spotlight its theme on the Silk Roads, which we considered one of its unique selling points (USP). However, we had a unique challenge because of preconceived notions.
Many people associate the Silk Roads with Marco Polo, who famously travelled to various cities along the trading route. However, in the course of our research, we gathered that Marco Polo was more of the exception than the rule – the Silk Roads were more of a trading route facilitating cultural exchange than a site of epic adventure and travel.
In line with that, Merchant Trails focuses more on the trading aspect of the Silk Roads, as players send out camel caravans to collect goods and sell them in different cities along the trading route.
Our network of goods with a bunch of hidden camels – can you spot all 3?
We thought that highlighting either the goods or the camel caravans would be a good starting point for ideation while removing the expectations of a travel or adventure game.
Our Favourite Rejects
The Silk, Spice, Scrolls & Stones Roads
I thought this was super funny and liked that it referenced all 4 of the goods featured in the game! (We later officially named “Scrolls” as “Paper” and “Stones” as “Jewels”.)
Merchant Masters
We really loved Merchant Masters, and even came up with a “gang sign” that would’ve been great for marketing material – but we felt like this would give it the tone of a party game.
Judging by the awkwardness of this photo, maybe it was a good thing we didn’t go with Merchant Masters…
While Merchant Trails features a fair bit of player interaction, it’s more of an intense optimising game than a loud party game. (Although you might be fooled watching some of our internal playtest videos – we get very loud and competitive.)
We didn’t want players to go in expecting the latter, only to be disappointed when they realised that they would have to wrack their brains to win. While you can’t make sure that everyone likes your game, having its name align with its weight and gameplay primes players for what to expect – and can help your game find the right audience!
Unfortunately, a lot of our fun jokey names ended up having the same problem:
Caravan Catastrophe!
Silk Road Stonks
Buy Low, Sell High
Buy My Merch (on the Silk Road)
Merch King
Print and Profit (PnP) Silk Road Merchant
Are you Merchant Material???
They’re fun to look back on, though!
Mercantile Network/Maps/Origins
Rita, one of our interns, came up with a bunch of names that incorporated the word “mercantile”. Unfortunately, I didn’t know what “mercantile” meant, and since I believe my version of reality is the only valid one, I assumed that there might be other people who didn’t, either.
(This is where working as a team comes in handy! You can default to the lowest common denominator, which so far has been me.)
I thought it would be better to have something that people could recognise right off the bat, but can see how having something more novel could pique the interest of potential players as well. What would catch your eye – something familiar or a cool-sounding word that you’d have to find out more about? Let us know in the comments!
The Winner
An example of a game round from our rulesheet!
In the end, we settled on Merchant Trails: The Silk Roads, as it highlights one of the central mechanics in the game – sending your caravans to collect goods on the shared map also sends the next player on a trail of your choosing. It’s serious enough that it conveys the weight of the game without being too dry, and includes our USP “The Silk Roads” right in the title!
You can get Merchant Trails: The Silk Roads for free by subscribing to our newsletter here! We’re very excited to have this game out in the world, and will be releasing more maps and cities periodically through our newsletter.
