Icebreak is now Chinwag.

What changed, and what did not

Two things changed. The name, on the App Store and under the icon on your home screen. And the icon itself, which is now two mouths mid-conversation, because that is the product: the app deals the question, the room does the talking. The wordmark keeps the same split-colour treatment it always had, documented with the rest of the identity on the branding page.

Everything else is exactly where you left it. The same app, updated in place. All twenty-six decks and all 3,069 questions. Anything you unlocked stays unlocked, because a rename never touches the identifiers underneath the listing, the ones purchases actually attach to. If you had Icebreak on your home screen yesterday, you have Chinwag today, and it is the same app in every way except the label. A rename, not a relaunch.

The problem with being one letter from an ordinary word

Icebreak is one letter from icebreaker, and icebreaker is not a brand. It is an ordinary English word with one of the most crowded search results a party app could stand next to: interchangeable lists of icebreaker questions by the hundred, corporate warm-up exercises, conference nametag games. We wrote a whole guide on why most of that genre is boring. Sharing a name with the genre meant living on its shelf.

The old name did honest work: it said what the app is for. That is also the trap. A name that describes the category belongs to the category. A person who hears about the app at a party, remembers the name and goes looking for it starts that search in the middle of the largest pile of generic content in this corner of the internet. A name that is a common noun is very hard to find and very hard to own, and no amount of good product fixes that from underneath.

Why Chinwag

A chinwag is an informal word for a friendly chat. It is a real word people already know, not a startup compound with the vowels squeezed out, and it names the thing the app actually makes. The cards are not the point of a round; the talking they start is. An hour with the app is, literally, a chinwag.

It is also a British and Australian word rather than an American one, which fits: the app is made on the Gold Coast, and the name comes from the same shelf of the language as the product. And unlike icebreaker, chinwag is not the name of a content category. It is distinctive enough to point at one thing.

Why the store says Chinwag: Party Games

A single word tells you almost nothing about what you are about to download. "Party Games" is the honest suffix: it says what the app is, in the two words a listing gets before somebody scrolls past. The name carries the character, the suffix carries the category, and a store listing needs both.

Worth knowing if you are naming an app: store names are unique per storefront, and what is available differs country by country. The naming reflex is to check whether the domain is free. The check that decides what you can actually ship is whether the store name is free, storefront by storefront. Check the store, not just the domain.

The name that lost: Hot Seat

One other name made the shortlist and died there. Hot Seat describes the game's best moment, the whole room pointing at one person, and it would have been a strong name if Millionaire Hot Seat were not an active Australian television brand. That is a trademark concern, not a copyright one, and the distinction is worth being precise about because it changes what the law is protecting. Copyright protects a particular work, and nobody owns two dictionary words as a piece of writing. A trademark protects the link between a name and a category in a market, and in the country this app comes from, an entertainment brand already answers to Hot Seat. You cannot trademark-clash your way into a category someone already occupies by name, however different your product is, and a party game sits close enough to a game show to make that exactly the fight to avoid. Finding this out at the shortlist stage cost nothing. Finding it out after launch would have cost a second rename.

The name on the door now matches the room

That is the whole story. No pivot, no new app, nothing to re-buy or re-download beyond an ordinary update. The questions keep being chosen the same way they always were, the guides on this site still hold, and the free New Friends deck is still free. The game was always about getting a room talking. Now it is named for it.

Read nextWhy most icebreakers are boringThe genre we no longer share a name with →