Hello and Happy New Year to everyone! I know my posting has not been as continuous as before, but I'm sure you'll all be happy to know that I am resting and enjoying life with friends and family locally here in el Líbano.

My niece asked me last night if it was true what she heard, that there are some people that make money playing video games. I had to think for a minute, but I said to her, 'I make money playing video games'.

Even though I really consider myself a fund manager, its not untrue that I make money playing games. In fact, I'm one of the top ranked dCity players in the world, and I have been getting rewarded handsomely for it.

As we begin this new year, its an interesting observation, playing dCity may be the most successful thing I have ever done.

I hold the top spots for Education and Creativity, and my main city is now ranked 8th for Population, which used to be the main stat used to rank cities. But I also have my main alt, which is the highest population city in the game.

This alt city manages to get half a hive per day from that and its #4 creativity ranking, of course this number is limited by the luxury tax amount, since the city has negative income.

I also am the top immigrant and homeless trainer, I loaded up on what I felt were cheap job center tokens from a long time back and have been mining citizen tokens and training them ever since.

Most of my alternative stats are pretty good too.

I am only number 8 in War shares, this is probably the competitive stat that I rank the worst on. War is a racket, and there are a few accounts that benefit a lot, and I just haven't made the push recently, at some point in the past I flipped all my war materials profitably only to watch war go on to get even more profitable and expensive.

Who are my competition?

We can already see some of the other top players emerging. @d-pend, @steemshiro and @jelly-cz. Each has some alts as well, which I can more or less keep track of, but what is most interesting to me about this game, is that none of these top players use the same strategy as me, and between each other they are not that similar either.

Steemshiro focuses on an industrial/war strategy, d-pend uses the 'buy a lot of cards' strategy, and jelly seems to make markets and calculate marginal income strats for undervalued cards. I use a citizen and creativity mining base to also attempt a 'buy-low' and 'sell-high' strategy.

But none of our cities look similar to a 'meta-game'. dCity is brilliant in this way!

As a new year (and new game) come out, I am happy to look back over how this year has treated me, and its been pretty good.

I think one goal for me in this new year is to get my neice to play my splinterlands cards, probably using half the income to reinvest in cards and the other half to save for some sort of college fund. If I can get her posting as well, I am sure she will be set up for university by the time she gets there.

I am keeping an eye on @ragnarok.game account as well as everything @edicted posts. I don't generally jump head first into games, but I do like to try them all out! I enjoy very much competitive strategy games, and I thank my parents for enjoying board games and things like chess.

After a long conversation with my niece's mother, I can honestly say that we are living in a crazy world where things are changing, and I will continue to do my best to stay abreast of the new without forgetting to reinvest and innovate with the old.

The world is our oyster!

Freedom and Friendship!