Happy Valley Casino representatives on Wednesday revealed updated renderings and details for the new gambling venue at the Nittany Mall.
The new look at the category 4 casino, scheduled for an April grand opening, came during a hearing in Harrisburg in which the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board unanimously approved authorization for the facility to operate 600 slot machines and issuance of a certificate to operate table games. The casino still needs to request issuance of a slot machine license, which is expected to occur in December.
Here’s what general manager Eric Pearson and attorney Michael Fabius of Ballard Spahr shared about the 94,000-square-foot casino, which will be a 24/7, smoke-free operation in the former Macy’s anchor spot in the College Township mall.
Food and Beverage
The casino will have two eateries along with a centralized bar servicing the sit-down restaurant and the gaming floor, Pearson said.
Aces Social will be the sports-themed sit-down restaurant with large-screen televisions, though Pearson said he “wouldn’t call it a sports bar.”
“It’s a pretty broad menu,” he said.
Lucky Break Cafe, meanwhile, will be a quick-serve outlet akin to a consolidated food court, offering selections such as pizza, burgers, sandwiches, ice cream and coffee,
“When a player gets hungry, they have a place to go real quick to get something good to eat and get back to playing their games,” Pearson said.
Both outlets are owned and operated by Happy Valley Casino, not leased to another party.
Slots and Table Games
Happy Valley Casino plans to open with 600 slots (and will pay a fee of $6 million to do so), though as a category 4 casino it is able to apply for up to 750.
Opening with fewer slots than the maximum is a strategic decision, Pearson said.
“It’s really from a standpoint of being able to strategically field the right mix of games to the players that will come to Happy Valley Casino once we open,” he said “This initial order is our best guess. It’s a very educated guess; we’ve been doing this a long time. But it is still our best estimation as to what the playing public in the region are going to want to play. Once we get open we’ll have a much better sense of what those player preferences are and we can add those additional units with much better intelligence than we can just filling out the whole floor based on best guess.”
The vast majority — 86% — will be low-denomination machines, which Pearson said have shown to be the most popular draw at casinos around the state and throughout the industry. The remaining slots will be split evenly between medium- and high-denomination.
Video reel slots will account for 90%, with stepper, or mechanical, slots accounting for 6% and video poker 4%.
Pearson said the casino’s “full goal and expectation” is to expand up to the maximum 750 slots over two to three years.
The casino will open with 30 table games across four pits, though it can request up to 40 and its floor is designed to accommodate additions. Fabius said the casino paid the $2.5 million table games authorization fee on Wednesday morning.
The tables will include two craps, three roulette, three midi baccarat, two face up pai gow poker, two three-card poker, two Mississippi stud, two Ultimate Texas Hold ‘Em, two Spanish 21 and 12 blackjack.
Games were selected based on the market, Pearson said, considering that most dealers will be new to the job and that table games will be new to the area.
“We are very fortunate that Pennsylvania has a very robust and established casino industry, but we’re pretty far from the other properties in the commonwealth,” Pearson said. “So our primary approach and strategy to fielding our complement of dealers is that we understand that we’re going to be training them and sort of growing our own, so to speak, which we’re very excited to do. In addition to our approach to training the staff, we’ve also had an eye to understanding those realities when we are making decisions on what table games we put on the floor and what our approach is and what technology we have supporting that.”
It will not have a sportsbook or iGaming integration, at least not to start.
“It’s something that we are tracking very closely,” Pearson said. “We’re sort of in an interesting position being, as of this moment, the last casino to come into the commonwealth. The iGaming space and sports gaming spaces are very well built out in PA and a lot of the bigger players very much dominate the market. It leaves us with sort of relatively limited options on smart ways to jump into that. We don’t have any active plans as of this moment for iGaming or sports betting whether online or retail… But it is something we constantly discuss and look at.”
Staffing
Happy Valley Casino is offering a free, 12-week Dealer School, with classes starting in December and January. So far it has received more than 250 applications, mostly from State College area residents, and those accepted will be paid $15 an hour for training 20 hours per week.
“We know that our success especially in table games is really going to be tied to the quality of dealers we’re able train up and move through the program and the service level that they give, especially as a new opening,” Pearson said. “We only have one chance to make a first impression and we want to make that as best as we possibly can.”
Casino representatives have attended “a significant amount of job fairs all around the community and have been welcomed with open arms every time we go to these events,” Pearson added.
He also noted that some applicants to the Dealer School have been identified for skill sets and experiences that are better suited to other positions in the casino.
A staffing plan will ensure round-the-clock monitoring and security for all slot and table areas and cage and count room operations, Pearson said. He added that every slot machine will be covered by pan, tilt, zoom cameras, while all tables will have at least one fixed overhead camera.
In total, the casino is expected to employ about 300 people.
How We Got Here and What’s Next
Casino owner SC Gaming, which is led by investor and Penn State alumnus Ira Lubert, won an auction to apply for a category 4 “mini-casino” license with a $10 million bid in 2020 and received license approval from the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board in 2023, but a legal challenge from a competing bidder held up the estimated $120 million project until the state Supreme Court dismissed the case in 2024.
The company has since partnered with Saratoga Casino Holdings LLC on development and management of the casino after Bally’s withdrew from the project. The PGCB in June gave conditional approval to Saratoga’s eventually taking on majority ownership of the casino.
College Township — which declined to opt out as a category 4 casino site during a limited window in 2017, citing the potential to revitalize the Nittany Mall — approved a land development plan for the facility in 2021.
Happy Valley Casino has not been without its detractors, who have maintained their long-running opposition to the project based on worries about gambling addiction, especially among students at nearby Penn State, an influx of crime and skepticism that the casino would be an economic boon. Pearson met with residents last fall to discuss their concerns.
Supporters have said that legal online options already make gambling widely available in Pennsylvania and that the region would experience an economic boost from a new entertainment venue, citing projected tax revenue for the township and county and new jobs.
College Township commissioned a third-party local impact study to evaluate the potential social and public safety effects, which the report projected to be minimal, and anticipated economic benefits, with the township expected to receive $1.4 to $1.6 million in new tax revenue annually.
Township council members said after receiving an overview of the report in September that it marked a starting point for monitoring and addressing any issues that may come with the new venue.
Substantial construction on the casino began early this year. According to Pearson’s presentation, construction is on track for completion by March 30, ahead of a grand opening in April.
