What the game is called: from Dice Wars - Forever to Auda Wars

Until October 2026 the game was called Dice Wars - Forever. The name suited the game well, but it had two weaknesses that could not be overlooked. The first: the words Dice Wars are the name of the original game from 2006 and who owns it is not clarified in the available sources (details are in the article about the original game). The second: Forever was not a name but the label of a mode that does not exist yet. The decision was made to look for a new name. The search took three days (21 to 23 October 2026), went through dozens of names and ended with a name that was not counted on at all at the start.

This article is a record of that search: what was found, where my mistake was and what changed in the code.

My criteria

The criteria were kept consistently, even though some of them were subjective:

Sound. The name has to sound good aloud, in Slovak and in English. There is no point in writing it for one person if it cannot be said.
Meaning. It should hint at dice, conquest or luck. It need not be direct, but it must not be misleading.
**Rhythm like Dice Wars.** Two syllables, stress on the first and the second, the ending Wars. My working hypothesis showed itself here too: names that end in a hard consonant (-gard, -craft, -smith) pull the tone down, and names with an open ending (-ay, -way, -ia) pull it up. It is my simplified rule, not a phonetic study; with each candidate I therefore take it as only one criterion.
A free domain. For a game that is to be played in a browser, a .com domain, or at least .io and .dev, is a condition. Without it there is no point in searching further.
Protectability. A descriptive word such as Kocka is hard to protect. An invented word is protected more easily.

Candidates and what was checked

The domains were checked through the registries (RDAP for .com, .io and .dev, WHOIS for .sk, .gg and .eu). Web search was used for collisions. The result can be summed up in one sentence: "I did not find it" does not mean "it does not exist", because a search engine is not reliable and the trademark databases could not be queried. For each name it was written down what was found and what was not.

The most important candidates:

Name	What was found	Verdict
DiceCraft	an iOS app DiceCraft: Board Game Roller (a tool for rolling dice), a prototype Dice Craft on itch.io and a tabletop game Castle Dice, which was originally called DiceCraft and began as a tabletop version of Minecraft (GamesBeat). The rules of the Minecraft brand protect "names that can be confused with Minecraft" (usage guidelines); in the part of the rules that was read, no rule about the suffix -craft was found.	the best meaning, but the most collisions
Dicewright, Dicemarch, Dicehex, Dicetide	all with free domains; Dicehex has a similar-sounding game, Diehexegy, on itch.io	kept as a reserve
Pipcraft	the domain `pipcraft.com` is for sale (a parking page, see the sources); in my opinion pip evokes an association with the tool `pip install`	rejected
Dicefront	a game DiceFront on itch.io: a two-player territorial game with dice, the same genre	rejected
Dicemancer	at least four games, one of them a commercial mobile one	rejected
Dadoforge	dado means a die in Spanish and Italian; the name is a literal translation of the well-known tabletop game Dice Forge (jbhifi)	rejected
Talismith	tali (Roman dice) plus smith; close to it is the brand Talisman	a reserve, rejected for the closeness
Kastgard	kast (a throw) plus gard (a seat, a realm); all domains free, no collisions found	approved as the name of the world
Kast Wars	the word KAST is the brand of a fintech with stablecoin cards (Fintech Futures) and of a platform for watching games together	rejected for the collision and the hard sound
Onnibay, Onni Wars	onni is Finnish for luck and also a male name; Onni & Ilona are toys for babies	Onnibay rejected because of the sound of honey
Oni War	a link from the Shaniverse wiki points to an invented war in a fictional universe, not to a game (wiki). The game ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni is a different title	not a collision, but an association with demons
Teni Wars	the domain is free, but Teni is the name of the Nigerian singer Teniola Apata (Wikipedia) and the game Tenzi is an established dice game with an almost identical sound	rejected
Kocka Wars	the Slovak word for a die is clear at home, but in English it is read "koka" and recalls coca	rejected
Auda Wars	Auda is shortened from Audna, the Old Norse auðna = luck and fate (Old Norse Dictionary); the domain is free	selected

What surprised me most was that the sound in English decided more than the meaning in Slovak. Kocka is read "koka" in English, and so the name that looked the most natural at home became unusable.

The name generator: what came out

Besides the manual search it was the turn of generating names. Two groups went through the .com domain registry (RDAP), measured on 21 Oct 2026:

786 combinations of roots (die, fate, throw, craft, six, from Latin, Greek, Finnish, Japanese, Hungarian, Sanskrit, Arabic and the Nordic languages) with melodic endings: 174 names had a free .com domain.
700 names by sound (consonant, vowel, smooth consonant…): 443 names had a free .com domain.

A few candidates were chosen by hand from the generated names and checked on further domains as well. The scripts were archived together with the working notes when the working folder of the project was closed. There are many generated names with a free domain, and that is exactly why the sound and the meaning matter, not the freedom itself.

The hero: from Dodo through Tur to Auda

The game has a hero who is the avatar of the player and the voice of the narrator (details are in the article about the boxes). The default name was Dodo, a playful name that suited the tone of the narrator. A name was sought that carries the theme of luck and is not tied to gender.

It turned out that the name of the hero does not decide the grammatical gender, as far as that can be found out from the code. The game has one setting of the gender of the player (cfg.gender), neutral by default ('n'), and the hero gets its gender from that, not from the name. A grep over all the catalogues showed that the name is not used in grammatical sentences; it appears only in the description of the avatar and in a note about the change. The ending -a in the name therefore causes no grammatical gender.

The default name could therefore be changed to Auda, which can also be read as Auda's wars and connects the hero with the name of the game. At the same time "Kastgard" stays as one of the worlds of the game, so the story and the brand each have a name of their own.

What changed in the code

The renaming was done as one whole, not in pieces. It touched 59 files (according to git diff): the name in the catalogues of nine languages, the page title, the manifest, the footer, the licence, package.json and the tests. In this whole the mentions of the original game (the classical rules, the history) deliberately stayed; only the name of the game changed.

Two traps showed themselves during the renaming that are worth remembering:

The identifier of the backup. In the global replacement the internal identifier of the backup format (dice-wars-forever) was changed too. The new code would then have rejected the old backups. The migration tests, which restore data from the old code, caught it, and the identifier was put back. The rule is simple: the identifier of a format does not change with the name.
The picture of the game. The name is printed on the poster, so every output of the picture changed. According to the rule of the project the version of the picture was therefore raised to 3 and the golden fingerprints (174 outputs) were written again.

After all the changes the whole test suite passed: 2,087 passed, none ended in an error.

The continuation of 31 October: the name is considered again

The question of the name came back eight days later. The game is no longer just a duel of dice: it has two realms (Kastgard and Taflgard), a third one, for Sudoku, is decided, and the word Wars speaks about a part of the content. That is why a separate analysis docs/NAME.md was made. Nothing has changed: the game is still called Auda Wars, nothing has been registered or bought.

What the second round found:

**The word Auda is not free.** In the TMview database (EUIPO, 31 Oct 2026) AUDA is registered in the EU for the Italian U-POWER (class 9: protective footwear and clothing, a new application of 25 June 2026), for SND GmbH (class 28: balls and exercise equipment) and in Germany for Coachwhisperer GmbH (classes 9, 28 and 38). No registration is for games, but the check should be done by a lawyer, not by this article. At the same time it is a real Norwegian name from the Old Norse Auða, not an invented word.
Of my five new ideas two fell at the first check. Audado is a registered word mark in Germany for software (classes 9, 35 and 42, valid until 22 Jan 2030). Aunado contains AUNA, held by Chal-Tec GmbH in class 9.
Two are clean. Audaheim and Audastig are free on eight domain suffixes including .com, have no title in the stores and have no registration in TMview. Heimir (the name of the game and of the hero) has no valid mark, but .com, .eu and .app are taken and it differs by one vowel from HEIMER, which is registered in the EU for software and applications.
Naming the third realm. Of seven names of the form root + -gard, Vitgard came out best in a rough filter (9 points out of 10), then Spelgard (8). Talgard, proposed by the Sudoku analysis, is one letter from Taflgard. The sum of points is a filter, not a verdict.

The lesson of the first round holds again: what a search engine did not find is not yet proof that it does not exist.

An update of 1 November 2026. The decision was made on 31 October: the game is called Audamir and its hero Auda (Heimir was tried for a few hours and cancelled), the realm Taflgard is called Rokgard. The way there and the numbers are in the article What the game is called II (forthcoming article no. 33). This article remains a record of the state of 23 and 31 October, which is why it still says the name Auda Wars.

What I take from it

Three things that hold outside this game too:

"Not found" does not mean "does not exist". The search engine did not find the game Oni Saga, although, as I pointed out, it exists. A search result is thus no proof of non-existence. For every name it has to be said what was checked and what was not.
The sound in a foreign language decides. A name that feels natural at home may sound inappropriate in English. Kocka is "koka" in English, and that recalls slang for a drug. Only reading the name aloud made me notice this association.
An invented word is not automatically strong. Auda is shortened from Audna and therefore has a natural origin in the Nordic world of the game. Many invented words are only a sound without a meaning, and are protected the more weakly for it.

Sources and notes

The second round (31 Oct 2026): docs/NAME.md in the repository of the game. The registrations of the word Auda are in section 2.3, the five new names in section 8 (the registrations in 8.3, the order in 8.7), the naming of the third realm in section 4.4; the numbers of the registrations and their state are from TMview and the WIPO Global Brand Database as of 31 Oct 2026, not from this article.
The original game and its name: Twenty years in this series (the Flash version of June 2006).
Castle Dice (originally DiceCraft): GamesBeat, a list of games for video game players. The article mentions that Mojang did not give a licence; this statement is from the search, not from my own reading of the whole article.
The Minecraft brand guidelines: Minecraft usage guidelines. The concept "confusingly similar" and the ban on names that could be confused with Minecraft. No rule about the suffix -craft was found in the part that was read.
Dice Forge: Libellud Dice Forge at JB Hi-Fi. A tabletop game whose name is translated literally in the candidate Dadoforge.
KAST (fintech): Fintech Futures, USD 80 million Series A. The Kast platform for watching games together is from the search, not from my own check.
Teni (singer): Wikipedia, Teni (singer). The BET and MTV EMA nominations of 2019 are from the search, not from the page that was read.
Auda and Audna: Old Norse Dictionary, audna. The meaning of auðna as luck and fate; the dictionary is a source for Old Norse, not for the name of the hero.
Oni War: Shaniverse wiki, Oni War. The page was loaded in the built-in browser, because direct access is blocked by Cloudflare.
Measurements: the combinations of names and the numbers of free .com domains of 21 Oct 2026 are from the name generators generator-nazvov-korene.py and generator-nazvov-zvuk.py and the domain check overenie-domen.sh (an archive of working notes, 23 Oct 2026). The results may change, because domains can be registered at any time.
Kast (the platform): a search result that describes it as a social platform for watching games together; not read in full.
Tenzi: search results about the dice game Tenzi (the goal: to have the same number on all ten dice); not read in full.
Onni & Ilona: a search result (apps and toys for babies); not read in full.
Pipcraft: the page pipcraft.com with an offer of sale (a HugeDomains parking page); checked in the domain check of 21 Oct 2026.
The rule about tone (a name pulls up or down) is my simplification, not a phonetic study.
**The meaning of *Onni*** (Finnish luck and a male name): Wiktionary. The data on the number of bearers differ between the sources, so I do not give them in the text.
Grammatical gender and the setting of the game: js/i18n/i18n.js (the default 'n'), js/ui/app.js (hero: { name, gender: cfg.gender }).

What could not be verified is marked in the text. The legal assessment of the name, the registration of a trademark and the availability of domains are not part of the article.