What happens in Voyagers stays in Voyagers.
Casinos can be fun places, with their bright lights, variety of games, and chances to win cash. Alternatively, they can be seedy, corrupt places run by sleazy con men. Either way, it can be interesting to have an episode that takes place at a casino.
If a character intentionally comes to the casino, then why they do so tends to vary. It may be because they need money, and they'll do anything to get it. Maybe they just came there for some casual card games. Maybe they know the casino is corrupt, and aim to shut it down.
Super-Trope of Casino Park, the Casino Episode of Video Games. Related to Viva Las Vegas!, where the city is synonymous with casinos. If they're there to rob a casino or someone there, it may overlap with Heist Episode.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Anne Happy: A good part of episode 8 takes place in a Virtual Reality casino, where the various games of chance will be used to measure the luck of Class 7's students, who are supposed to have different levels of Born Unlucky.
- One Piece Film: Gold takes place on a casino-themed boat so large that it's considered its own country.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: "The Stripping", which doubles as a Broke Episode.
- Pokémon: The Original Series: Subverted with "The Song of Jigglypuff" episode. The city that Ash and friends visit is a stand-in for Las Vegas, complete with casinos inside. But the casinos are merely background props to highlight that nobody has been sleeping at all. Instead, the episode focuses on Jigglypuff and its attempt to get someone to listen its song all the way through, with the casino city only serving as Jigglypuff's final audience due to its reputation of never sleeping.
Comic Books
- The Authority: Issue #0 of the third volume features Viceworld, a world-sized casino and pleasure complex catering to people across the multiverse. Viceworld is owned by Madorra Chance orders an invasion of the Authority's planet so people can bet on who will win.
Comic Strips
- The fourth chapter of British comic Axa has the heroine and her lover encounter a casino, still operating amid a Crapsack World. Axa's lover tricks her into using her jeweled sword as gambling stake, only to lose it. Axa has to fight in Gladiator Games to win it back.
Literature
- Philo Vance: The Casino Murder Case isn't exclusively set at Kinkaid's Casino, but several major scenes take place there. Vance goes there in the second chapter because he got an anonymous letter warning him of danger to another patron.
Live-Action TV
- One episode of Airwolf has a mob-run casino seek to expand by muscling out local shops and marginalizing the townsfolk. When corrupt police won't help, More Dakka solves the problem.
- Angel had two gambling-themed episodes, "Double or Nothing" (which involved gambling for souls, in a way that is very hard to reconcile with the treatment of souls in other Buffyverse works), and "The House Always Wins" (in which an evil casino turned out to be stealing its customers' destinies).
- One Banacek episode is "A Million The Hard Way" in which a casino put $1 million in cash in a display case for patron to pose beside. The money disappears while an elderly couple are being photographed beside it.
- Blake's 7. In "Gambit" while Blake is searching Freedom City for a MacGuffin, Avon and Vila decide to use Magical Computer Orac to win at the casino owned by the local crime boss.
- Quite common on CSI, naturally, given that the series is set in Las Vegas. Usually the plots involved someone being found dead in a casino or stuff done by corrupt casino owners like, to a point, Catherine’s dad.
- Full House has the season 2 two-part finale episode "Luck Be a Lady", where the gang is in Lake Tahoe, and the girls try playing the slot machine, where they end up winning the jackpot, but then have to return the money after they get caught.
- The Glades: In "Honey", Jim Longworth's latest case sends him to the famed Native American-owned Blues Rock Casino, a high-end gambling establishment filled with millions of dollars of rock 'n' roll memorabilia. When the head of the casino, a tribal elder, crashes through a skylight and lands on a roulette table, Longworth must figure out who is behind her mysterious death. Was it suicide or foul play? Jim's first hurdle is getting the smart and sexy Josie Tigertail, a tribal police officer, to allow the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to run point on the investigation.
- Here Come the Brides has "A Hard Card to Play," in which a professional gambler and his wife come to Seattle. The town charter forbids gambling, so the two set up shop on Captain Clancey's ship, where all the loggers come to gamble. Clancey ends up betting the ship and losing, and the Bolts have to put themselves even deeper in debt to Aaron Stempel to win it back. It turns out Stempel invited the gamblers to Seattle as part of a ploy to win Bridal Veil Mountain from the brothers. Joshua manages to win enough at poker to keep Clancey's boat and pay off their new debt to Stempel.
- Hustle: In "Big Daddy Calling", while on a holiday in Las Vegas, Albert is recognised by an old friend, the head of security at a major casino. Although satisfied that Albert isn't scamming the hotel the owner - Joey Maranzano, son of a famous mafia boss - decides to teach Albert a lesson anyway, taking a baseball bat to his hand. The team decide to get their revenge by stealing $5 million on display behind an aquarium in the hotel lobby.
- Lie to Me: "Fold Equity" has the Lightman Group going to Vegas to investigate the disappearance of a finalist in the World Series of Poker. Cal's skill in reading people has actually gotten him banned from the city before, so he's forbidden from any gambling while he's there.
- There was a second revival of Maverick from the early 1980s called Bret Maverick, including a two-part episode called "Faith, Hope, and Clarity" which involves the title character directing a sting to help the townsfolk get their land back from a guy that cheated them out of their land titles. The Con involves the townsfolk setting up a casino on the second floor of the local saloon, including knocking out walls between bedrooms to make a larger space.
- A popular setting for Mission: Impossible, most notably the episodes "Odds on Evil", "The Emerald", and "The Party". On those episodes, the IM Force get their target to gamble away large sums of money that were earmarked for more nefarious purposes.
- In the Scorpion episode "Shorthanded", a Las Vegas casino hires the Scorpion team to locate a flaw in its security—and then gets robbed while our heroes are still on the premises. When some of the missing money is planted in Walter's hotel room, he's arrested and the rest of the team falls under suspicion, so they set out to prove Walter (and themselves) innocent.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "The Royale", the crew discover a replica of a 20th-century Earth casino on an alien planet. Turns out the aliens modeled it after a badly-written novel.
- Star Trek: Picard: Most of the action in "Stardust City Rag" is set in Bjayzl's casino, and the planet Freecloud itself is Space Las Vegas.
Podcasts
- Just Roll With It Show has one in the form of the Blue Royale Casino, a floating island with a giant casino on top of it. It is later discovered that the casino traps whoever comes inside of it, freezing them in time.
Tabletop Games
- The Crimestrikers episode seed "Shrunk and Disorderly" is set at the Bona Fortuno, Creaturia's largest casino. Several Crimestrikers, trapped in Incredible Shrinking Man mode, use their reduced size to wreak havoc as they avoid enemies who are hunting for them.
Video Games
- Season 6 of Noel The Mortal Fate has this as the premise in order to take out Russell’s money supply. It comes complete with playable slot machines, card games, being able to play as the other characters (save for Caron as he is taking over the cameras), and even some sidequests for the player to follow.
- Persona 5 has this in the form of Sae's Palace where she sees the Japanese court system as a casino where the game is rigged and the house always wins.
- Sam & Max: Freelance Police: "The Mole, The Mob, and the Meatball" in Season 1, where Sam and Max go to Ted E. Bear's Mafia-Free Playland and Casino, a casino-slash-Suck E. Cheese's designed as a rather half-assed front for The Mafia.
Web Animation
- In the episode "Casino, Cards, and Chaos" of Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers, Mario heads to a casino in desperate need for money. He doesn't do well on his own, but when he learns that Luigi has an innate power to win every game, Mario abuses Luigi's power and gets rich.
Web Video
- The Carpetbagger: Subverted. Jacob did a video
on the Circus Circus hotel-casino in Las Vegas, but he focused more on the arcade area than the casino itself.
Western Animation
- The episode "High Stakes Sonic" of Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog has Robotnik build a casino where all the games are rigged, so that all the sheep villagers who go there lose everything and are forced to work for him as slaves. Sonic goes to the casino to stop him, and plays many of the games to help the sheep. Also, in this episode only, Robotnik has a new henchman, an anthropomorphic shark (as in "card shark") named Smiley.
- Bob's Burgers: In "The Kids Run the Restaurant", the Belcher kids are left to watch the store while Linda takes Bob to the hospital to get stitches for a nasty cut on his "finger-crotch". They end up running a casino out of the basement, where they run into trouble when Mr. Fischoeder turns out to be a skilled Hustler.
- The DuckTales (2017) episode "The House of Lucky Gander!" takes place in a casino in the city of Macaw, where the Duck family visits their Born Lucky relative Gladstone Gander. The place is run by an evil spirit who holds Gladstone prisoner and feeds on his good luck.
- Family Guy: "The Son Also Draws" involves a car trip to New York. When Peter desperately has to use the bathroom, they stop off at a Native American Casino where Lois gets addicted to video poker and ends up losing the car in a bet. The rest of the episode centers on Peter's attempts to win the car back from the greedy Native American owners.
- Fudêncio e Seus Amigos: In the episode "Cassino", Conrado's phone bill reaches 50,000 bucks after loads of people visit his house just to listen to jokes through the phone. He decides to get the money at a casino, because his friend Popoto is somehow able to guess any number, making him win every time. The employees start suspecting it and decide to take Popoto away; Conrado wins again by remembering when someone told him what number to guess if he ever visits a casino. However, the police arrives, finds out it is an illegal casino, and arrests Conrado; when he's at jail, he can't call his dad from home because the phone line was cut.
- The Simpsons:
- In one episode, the church is destroyed, so Marge, Reverend Lovejoy, Ned Flanders, and some other churchgoers try to earn enough money at a casino for repairs.
- "$pringfield", has Mister Burns opening a casino, where Homer works as a blackjack dealer and Marge becomes addicted to playing slots.
- In "Viva Ned Flanders", Flanders is disappointed at how dull his life is, so he asks Homer for some advice, and Homer decides to take him to the aforementioned casino belonging to Mr. Burns. However, Flanders points out that the casino had just been demolished earlier in the episode, so they head to Las Vegas, where they accidentally get married to two cocktail waitresses during their bender there.
- In the South Park episode "Red Man's Greed", the entire population of South Park goes to a casino hold by Native Americans and lose all their money, the whole episode being a comedic reversal of America's western colonization.
