Board game trademarks

A trademark protects the name of your game and your company, plus logos, as identifiers in the marketplace. It is the reason you cannot publish a game called Catan, even with completely different rules. Trademarks exist so customers know who they are buying from, and in board games the title is often the single most valuable piece of intellectual property a publisher owns, because it is the only part competitors legally cannot copy.

Before you fall in love with a title, search for it. Check BoardGameGeek for existing games with the same or a confusingly similar name, search the USPTO trademark database (or your country's equivalent), and do a plain web search. In the US, you gain some trademark rights just by using a name in commerce, but registration gives you much stronger protection, a public record of your claim, and the ability to enforce nationwide.

A US federal trademark registration typically costs a few hundred dollars in filing fees per class if you file yourself, and more like one to two thousand dollars with an attorney handling the search and application. Many small publishers file for their company name and their flagship title and skip registration for smaller releases. The most common painful outcome is not litigation, it is discovering after your campaign that another game already owns the name and having to rebrand with printed boxes on a boat.

This is general information rather than legal advice. Trademark law has real nuance, especially around how similar is too similar, and a trademark attorney can run a proper clearance search for less than the cost of reprinting a box. If your game becomes a hit, that early search will look like the best money you spent.