But when there are lots of games, there are also more and more not-so-good games being published. The problem with most games today are two things:

First – and most common and actually the most severe problem – is that the games have complicated and difficult rules. Complex rule systems tend to drag games into long rule discussions instead of fun game play. Lacking fun and action, also means that the game soon will lose its power – and its players.

Complicated games are made, usually, by companies that don’t put enough work into the game developement. Instead, they focus on the commercial campaign, or the franchise – if the game is linked to one.

This adds many problems. First, of course, the game becomes difficult to get into. If tt’s hard for the player to understand the rules, it will take longer time for the players to actually start the game. Second, it adds confusion during game play. Confusion during game play leads to mistakes, and that draws the fun out from the game itself.

But worst is that the most complex games usually have drawbacks in their own rules, since they usually have contradicting rules or rules that are made just to counter other rules – rules for the rules sake.

The second big problem that many card games have is the design. Also here, complex design is not the best. On the contrary – even if it might look great on the first glance, complicated lay-out and design usually means that the game play is slowed down due to difficulties to find value indicators, rules and text. A cluttered design means a cluttered game.

Today, many game factories publish their crads with a simple Times New Roman font in hope that it is the most readable text they can produce. Where it might look good – and read well – in a newspaper printed on low quality paper, it is not necissarily the best choice for a card game.

Instead, it is usually better to go for a straight font, similar to Futura, Helvetica or Gill Sans. This might look boring during the work process – but usually you end up with a card that is much more readable in a quick look – and that is what we are after.

Card games today can reach from a few cards up to the hundreds! No one can keep track of 500 cards, so the cards needs to have a neat and proper layout that works as effectivly as the rules.

The new fantasy card game from Xemytica™, ”Fate of Heroes”, is one of these action-packed games that uses a minimalistic design that works very well together with the rules. Instead of a clutted lay-out, these cards are clean and easily read. All important rules and values are placed in the corners – as that is the place where it most easy to focus quickly on a game card.

Pictures and rule text are placed in the middle, and the rule text is carefully layouted using the Gill Sans font in bold, normal or italic – each for each own purpose! The bold is only used for value modifications, normal for rules and italic for flavor text.

A really great fantasy card game is made by a game company who understands that simplicity is the foundation for success, but a great fantasy card game is only created together with its players. The players are very important to fully understand what cards are good – and which are not.

When picking up your next card game, check extra carefully on how complex the rules and design are. Chances are that the game will just be that: complicated, and not fun.

Card games are supposed to be fun. So get yourself a great game – and have fun!

Fate of Heroes is a fantasy CCG (Collectible Card Game) released in 2009 by Xemytica™. Xemytica™ is a card game rule system that is very fast paced and quick to play. It is simple and minimalistic, but instead, very fast and easy to get into.

Xemytica™ is used by Fate of Heroes as the rule system, but other games (as 1910) also use the same rules (with slight modifications).

Fate of Heroes comes in a Starter Pack (you will need to buy this first to play the game) and add-on packs (which adds more cards to your starter pack). The Starter Pack has 17 Fighter cards, 17 Fate cards and 17 Gear cards. The Fighters are blue, the Fate cards red and the Gear cards purple.

The game play is very simple. Everyone first creates a deck with a value of 30 points. To do this, you look on the top right corner of each card. There you will see one, two or three dots. This is the value. You add cards together until you reach 30 points – no more. This will create a deck for you with between 10 to 30 cards. Each player then places the deck in front of him (or herself – I will use he/him for the rest of this article, but always implies she/her), facing down. Then draw eight cards.

You may draw cards at any time, and you can even discard to draw new cards. However, you may never pick up a discarded card.

Now, the battles begin! And this is how you play it (and now I will also show you a few inside tricks).

First place out a Fighter (a blue card). On the bottom of this card are three squares with a point value for Strength, Speed and Skill. These are your Attack Values, or Action Values. The purpose of the game is to get one of these values as high as possible – it doesn’t matter which, the Fighter with the highest in any of these values wins that battle.

Now place a Fate card (red). Add any modifications listed on the card, or do as the card rules say. Sometimes, card rules contradict main rules (for instance, there are cards that actually allow you to pick up discarded cards!).

Last, play a Gear card (purple). Add modifications and now see which Fighter has the highest value of any of the Action Values. That Fighter wins.

The beauty of Fate of Heroes (and the Xemytica™ rule system) is that each player plays out their Fighter, Fate and Gear cards simultanously! You play each card at the same time as the other players! This makes it more real time, and you can’t change you mind ones you have played out your Fighter. This really adds to the fun of the whole game!

The player that wins the battle can place all the played cards back into the deck. The loser(s) however, discard all played cards.

When there is only one player with Fighter card(s) left, that player wins the whole game!

This is how easy it is to actually play Fate of Heroes. But now, how do you really trick the other player so you can win all the time? It all comes down to two things: creating a killer deck and playing the cards in the right manner.

For instance, if you have a Fighter with Strength 7, Speed 5 and Skill 3, your opponent will probably believe that you will boost the Strength value. Hence, he might put out a Fate card that actually lowers your Strength!

But if you have been prepared for this, you can already in the Fate phase play a modification to Speed – and actually win the game because you have the highest score on Speed, and not Strength!

Playing the game like this actually creates a more living and fun game session.

Also, carefully check the Fate cards that can be played before the Fate phase, or that can actually be played at any time. These are valuable cards and can seriously confuse your opponent’s strategy.

There are a lot of things you can do with Fate of Heroes, and since the rules are so simple and easy to understand, you will very quickly find it a powerful game and start tweaking your deck.

Now have fun and go out there and play a lot of card games!

Do you create music and sell online? Maybe you sell on Spotify, Last.fm or some other online service. Maybe you have a band who tours small towns and mostly play on bars and don’t sell any CD:s. Well – either way, this article is for you.

I take examples from the Swedish electronic artist Pingo® who recently released an album directly on Spotify, through the online label SouthPole Radio. With no budget at all, the name is out there and sales and streams are made. This is how you can copy that promotion plan and do the same thing yourself with your band, your artist, your music.

If you want to release your music on Spotify, please read my article ”How to get your music on Spotify – and earn money on it!”. Then head back to this text and find out how to start promoting!

Last.fm is a great place for an artist to write more about himself, push the music to friends and start a fan-base. MySpace is today also a very good artist platform. However, both of them lack a lot, specifically in technology, since both of the websites are a bit old fashioned and – especially MySpace – is a slow and heavy site with too much scripts and bad design. However, since the sites are used by so much people, they are still two sites that an artist should sign up on.

After adding your artist page to MySpace and Last.fm it’s time to create your own website. If you don’t already have one (you should!), then find a good webhost (I suggest HostGator, since it’s cheap and have very good service in different languages) where you easily can install a WordPress blog. Hostgator (and many other hosts) have the cPanel. cPanel is an add-on many hosts have where you easily can install several different scripts and functions for your website. WordPress – the blogging script – is one of these.

Before you buy hosting, however, you need a domain name. You can buy that online on any domain registration company (I usually use GoDaddy). Choose a name that is as close to your artist’s or label’s name as possible. Try to go for the .com domain, but if that is not accessable, you can go for anything – if you have your band residing in any other country than USA, you should of course go for that country’s localized top domain.

Hosting and domain name is the only costs in this. The hosting is around $5 per month, and the domain name is approximalty $10 for a whole year.

When you have linked your domain with your hosting, head into the cPanel and do the easy installment of the WordPress blog. After that, head into the WordPress admin panel and choose a theme that fits your artist or label design. Now you have your own place on the ‘net and now the real business starts.

Use Twitter. Create an account if you don’t have one, and see to it that the WordPress theme you are using also can handle a Twitter ”widget”. Installing such a widget in WordPress makes your latest twitter end up directly on your website.

In Last.fm link your feed (the rss-link from your WordPress site) to the site. You can add this in the Music Manager on Last.fm.

Now sign up for a YouTube account. Make a video. You can make any video you like to one of your tunes using a regular video- or digital camera. Either just film yourself singing, have a friend film you live or do a stop-motion animation (as Pingo® did) or anything else you can think of! There are lots free software out there that can help you with the editing and creation of your video.

Upload the video to your YouTube account and use the embedd link on your WordPress blog. Write a news post about it, and see the news post end up on Last.fm too!

Now use your own network to promote your website. The nice thing with all this is that you now can sell your music as downloadable mp3′s via Last.fm, get payed for it, get payed for streams via Spotify – but only have to take care of two things: your news posts on your website and your small twitters via Twitter. Everything else is updating itself!

So next time you are on tour – create a banner that has your website’s domain name on it. Spread the word of your domain name to your friend. Make stickers and put on your car. Spread that domain name any way you can!

The beauty in this is that you don’t have to spread your Twitter (since that feed is visible on your website, people may sign up to your Twitter account when they have found your website), you don’t have to spread your MySpace, Last.fm or Spotify links (which all can be a bit weird to send out to people anyway).

So with a little time, only a few bucks and some tweaking – you can end up selling your tunes for your unknown band in no time, with just a single domain name to spread and a lot of sites promoting your music.

Good luck!

During the years I created thousands of tunes. Many compositions were created together with friends, and later I started to make demos that we sent out to record labels. Together with a friend, we got signed on a small Swedish label that wanted to release one of our techno/trance tracks. We were of course very happy for this, and had big plans for the future. This is the first time I came across talks about earning money in context of our music.

However, that record label got into economic problems and we never saw our tune get released. Sadly so, because we both thought it was a very good song and we had a strong concept. The band name we choose was Cube, and we created some sort of mix between techno, trance and euro-disco.

The whole disco scene has always interested me, and I started up a large streaming radio channel via an online service back in the late 1990′s. This proved to be successful, especially since I played only Italo Disco and had many very obscure and different songs in the playlist. At one time, the radio station – then called SouthPole Radio – was the largest Italo Disco radio station on the internet.

But it is costly to run a radio station. Not only hosting and bandwidth – it also costs money to make it legal. All this was done by the online service, but I never got anything back. My radio station was free for all to listen to, and even though I recieved many happy emails about how good the station was, I spent more and more money on the music.

The station did inspire me to keep writing my own music, and I started yet again to create own tunes. This lead to buying equipment, and somewhere during 2000-2001, I created songs with an Amiga 1200 as sequencer (and sampler) hooked up to a Novation BassStation keyboard, a Roland TR-505 (a not so good drum machine) and a Roland SC-88 MkII – a very nice synth module with lots of good sounds.

But over the years, different software sollutions proved to be an improvement to the hardware. The equipment was sold and production started with only different sort of software programs, using everything from PC, Mac and even Atari computers.

When I first laid hands on Spotify I was amazed. Spotify is a very good music streaming service that is free in many parts of the world. But even the paid accounts are worth the money. Spotify tries to distribute all music ever published, which I believe is a hard and tough, but very good, goal.

Since Spotify is available all over the world today, and the fact that they have so much different music, there were no more use for an Italo Disco exclusive radio station anymore. SouthPole Radio was therefore turned into a record label, and in November 2009 SouthPole Radio released its first album: Antarctica, by Pingo® (spotify:album:7zUqiTY4BmwXXUWhP1kyti).

Before we released any album at all, we made a lot of research on how to actually release music on Spotify. First, we wanted to release for UK and USA charts too, and other media centers as Apple’s AppStore, Amazon and such. However, this proved to be fairly expensive, and without our label and artist name well known, we didn’t want to take that chance.

However, several different online systems (Ditto Music was the one we finally signed with) had very cheap methods for distributing to Spotify. SouthPole Radio therefore decided to exclusivly launch the first album on Spotify via this online system. It was very easy too!

Here is how we did it:
First we saved all the tunes in mp3-format in 320Kbps or higher resolution. After that, we created an account with Ditto Music and payed the £2 up front fee. This is a monthly fee that has to be payed for hosting, accounting and such. It is very cheap, and if you get 100 streams per month, you will break even.

You then upload the tunes together with a 800×800 pixel JPG-picture that is your cover art.

That’s it! After that, it takes about 4-5 weeks, and then your music is live for as long as you pay the £2 monthly fee.

For each stream that people listen to in Spotify you will get £0.02. This is also payed out to you monthly.

This is probably the most easy way – and maybe even the cheapest – to get your music on Spotify – and get payed for it! With a bit of marketing, you will get a lot of listeners, and the more listeners, the more you get payed.

If you then update your account on Ditto Music with downloads and other sales, you can keep selling your music for a profit.

If you want to know more, check out SouthPole Radio’s Official Website (http://www.SouthPoleRadio.com) and read our constantly updated news where we write about our newest releases, how to create your own album, how to get more listeners on Spotify and other interesting and important information that will help your own music career.