Jaws dropping...I can almost see the confused faces on my loyal friends here who have no idea what I am talking about.
Did she win the lottery? Meet a drug boss? Has she lost her mind?
Well, a bit of all three.
Of course, most of you here will know I am talking about Hive account@drugwars, this crazy and annoyingly addictive new game here on the Steem Blockchain, brought to us by none other than Hive account@hightouch and co.
So...now I'm addicted and it's all on one person, and one person alone.

Thanks Hive account@abh12345!

Of course, he had to go play a game and tell people about it! He couldn't just keep it to himself...
UGH... And I swore to myself, that I would stay away until the time was right! In other words: until I had some left-over time. Which would probably never happen, so yeah, a genuine thanks Asher! Your post stopped me from losing my marbles LOL.
Not really of course, but one can only stare at rainy, windy outdoors from rain soaked windows for so long, right?
It's not like I spend hours and hours (although tempting) in the game, because...well, my stash is growing, but only slowly.
No point hanging around. It's not like I can watch the growth come out of the ground.

I can see even more puzzled faces. No, there is no physical grow house...it's all in the game.

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Too much, too fast

So, when I started drug wars, I had no clue what it was and how it was played. But it doesn't take very long to understand the principles. I like that. At least it won't take me three weeks to learn the ins and outs of the damn game.
So because it was easy to understand, I easily understood that doing nothing, and waiting till the stash of drugs, alcohol, weapons and buildings for all sorts of business plans, would grow to a certain level, I would need a LOT of patience.

And there's the problem. I don't always have patience.

One of my best friends (I followed her to Ireland) often accused me of having patience like an angel. Now, I have no idea how much patience I should try to envision with that, but it's a Dutch expression, and I guess it means A LOT of patience. Well, that's simply not true. All lies!
You should have seen me. Buy a crack house here, then a cocina, and some other things that I 'needed' to advance little by little, but faster than the first option.
I ended up spending quite some Steem. And I know the price was not that high then, so it's peanuts really. But still a lot of Steem. And then I discovered that I was actually making money with the drug production.

How awesome is that?

So from one thing came another, and before I knew it, I landed in the Hive account@drugwars Discord channel, where I saw some familiar faces. Or the names with the faces, or whatever. Well, either way, I am now the proud member of THE Cartel. Not The Cartel, or the Cartel...but THE Cartel Hive account@steemcartel.

And you better get it right, because ...well...you know: hell to pay and all that.

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But if you dare, and we feel you're made of the right material, i.e: you are invincible, then you could even join us.

Safety in numbers...

But now back to my personal game thingie. I've spent some steem, but not really crazy amounts either. And I see Steem coming in daily. So last week, after a two day shopping spree, I decided to just 'sit one out' and build where I can, and wait for some resources to upgrade without having to spend Steem.

At the moment, my empire looks like this:

5 Headquarters
1 Training facility
2 Operation centers

Drugs:

5 Crack Houses
1 Hydroponic farm (ya know, growing because I can...)
1 meth lab
2 Cocinas
1 pharmaceutical lab and
2 storage spaces...

This drug business is not raking in as much as some players here, but I am still quite proud of my 55+ k per day.

What I realized was that I need to upgrade my lab, in order to get up the drug ladder a bit.
I need quite a bit of guns and alcohol for that, so now I am trying to figure out which to do first.
Wait, and get the lab, or upgrade others first. There are (I think) three transactions I can do that more or less give the same results, but either way, tomorrow things will change.

My first payout made me paranoid...

I received my first payout, both from Hive account@steemcartel and Hive account@drugwars, and I had to laugh for a bit seeing the memos.
'

Upgrade meth lab, here's your cut based on drug production, keep on hustling...if that doesn't create some raised eyebrows in people who don't know Steem or the game...

I carefully look around me and glare out the window to see if we don't have a SWAT team flying into the windows soon...
You never know, here in Ireland you can expect anything. After all, they caught Bin Laden here once too. Or so they thought...True story!

Any way, I carefully scramble on. Not knowing what the future will bring and if I will still have all my 'stuff' tomorrow.
Hoping that they let me gather some resources and an army first.

We'll see.

Thank you for reading!