Hi all! Long time reader, first time poster here at Hexus and I need your expertise help with my situation.

Firstly, here’s my scenario. At work, I live in accommodation that can be best described as “halls-of-residence style” found at universities. My block has 3 floors and 4 wings in a cross shape; each wing has 6 bedrooms (3 each side of the wing) as well as a common room and kitchen. Each room has its own phone line as well. Basically, I want to connect to my mate’s computer on the other side of the building to play games over a LAN. The current status of play at the moment is that I have my own wireless router (Netgear DG834GT) and 2Mbit line which is shared with the 2 rooms on my side of the corridor. My mate decided to share his 2Mbit connection wirelessly with someone in an adjacent wing since they have LOS, which works quite well. They are both in the floor above me. I have attached a diagram to help try to show my problem (I'm at X).

Code:
             _________
             |  | |  |
             |__| |__|
             |  | |  |
             |__| |__|
             |X | |  |
             |__| |__|
             |  | |  |
             |__| |__|
_____________|       |_____________
|  |  |  |? |         |  |  |  |  |
|__|__|__|__|         |__|__|__|__|
|___________           ___________|
|  |  |M2|  |         |  |  |  |  |
|__|__|__|__|_       _|__|__|__|__|
             |__   __|
             |  | |  |
             |__| |__|
             |M1| |  |
             |__| |__|
             |  | |  |
             |__| |__|
             |  | |  |
             |__|_|__|
I was thinking that to link the two networks together, I could put some sort of wireless bridger in their common room (? on diagram), since I have LOS to it. I have tried this by moving my router there and could get a strong signal on my PC and from my mate’s room (M2), so signal strength shouldn’t be too much trouble. However, I have a couple of problems: -

1. What should I get to bridge the 2 wireless networks? (Access Point, or something more specific)

2. How to set them up when they are bridged? The reason I ask this is because after doing some research, it seems having more than one router on the same network, each with a WAN access seems to make life complicated, especially when connected wirelessly. Most solutions I have come across use one of the routers in bridged mode, or just swapped out one of the routers for an access point. Throwing a 15m Cat5 cable out the window to the other wing is out of the question as well. However, those examples were connecting two routers together directly wirelessly and the problems occurred because the routers cannot act as both the server and client at the same time, or so is my understanding. Therefore, will having something in between the routers eliminate this problem?

Another option is to put a wireless repeater in the common room and to connect to their network with my PC’s wireless connection and connect to my router via an Ethernet cable. Which leads me to my next question, how will having two networks affect LAN gaming? i.e. when I’m hosting, which network would it host on?

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me.