After years of planning and development, Happy Valley Casino is ready to open its doors.
Located in the former Macy’s anchor spot at the Nittany Mall in College Township, Pennsylvania’s fifth category 4 “mini-casino” and 18th overall will open for “test days” from 2 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, giving the public a full preview before officially opening as early as Monday. Hours once fully open will be 10 a.m. to 2 a.m.
On Thursday, casino officials welcomed media for a look inside at the venue that will open with 600 slot machines, 30 table games, a full-service restaurant, bar and quick-serve food and beverage outlet.
GETTING IN
Public parking and entrance to the casino is on the East College Avenue side, and upon entry customers are greeted by staff who check IDs for the 21-and–older venue. To the right is the Players Club, where patrons can pick up their loyalty card that tracks spending and offers rewards.
While an entrance and exit point to the mall interior is constructed, it will not be open, at least initially.
“Currently, the Nittany Mall is not necessarily the hive of activity that we hope it develops into as we get up and going,” general manager Eric Pearson said. “We have to staff every entrance… We definitely want to be open to the mall a lot but it also doesn’t make a tremendous amount of sense for us from a labor standpoint to staff a security officer over there to stare at the mall with no one in it yet, but… I do know that interest in leasing spaces in the mall has significantly increased in recent weeks, which is very exciting for us. We very much want the mall to sort of reinvigorate. Part of the reason why we wanted to come here was to have the built-in infrastructure and have the foot traffic of a mall.”
Happy Valley Casino is one of only a few in the state that is fully non-smoking.
“We could have had up to about half of the casino floor be smoking and the other half non,” Pearson said. “I know I’ve visited a lot of casinos that take that route. It is still the same air that is in both sides, and we felt pretty strongly that, for this market, for what we wanted to build and the experience that we wanted to give, a fully non-smoking casino was really the right decision.
THE GAMES
Spread throughout the casino floor are a variety of slots and table games. After a year, Happy Valley Casino can up its table game allotment to 40.
At opening, table game options include craps, roulette, midi baccarat, face up pai gow poker, three-card poker, Mississippi stud, Ultimate Texas Hold ‘Em, Spanish 21 and blackjack.
“What games we activate, we call that our spread, which games we bring online with the limits we offer on them, and that’s something that we sort of dynamically manage as the day goes and as traffic changes,” Pearson said.
Adapting to the customer base, particularly in a new casino market like State College, is a philosophy that applies in the longer-term as well.
“We’re not opening with poker initially,” Pearson said. “But a lot of what we do here is sort of watch and see what comes in and react to it, try and serve the casino that the market wants.”
The same goes for slot machines. The casino has 600 at opening, though category 4 casinos are permitted to have up to 750.
Pearson said the casino will fill out its slot machine allotment in the future based on what appeals most to the customer base.
For now, the slots are mostly the newest models — tall, curved and colorful video reels. But the casino has brought in several used classic stepper reel machines as well.
One feature at Happy Valley Casino that Pearson said is unique among Pennsylvania casinos is the ability to order complimentary drinks directly from the slot machines. (Table games will have the traditional method of ordering from roving servers.)
“They’re not waiting for a server to go out, take a bunch of orders, go into the well, have the service bartenders set them all up and then bring them out,” Pearson said. “So it actually makes beverage service 100% more efficient because we are able to eliminate that on the slot side.”
At the back of the casino is a high-limit room featuring about three dozen slots and four table games. It’s another aspect that could evolve over time.
“Depending on what demand is, this entire room could turn into high-limit tables, or high-limit slots, or, you know, maybe neither really matter to this market,” he said. “And this could be where the poker room goes if we decide to do that.”
THE FOOD
A casino center bar faces the gaming floor and includes bartop slots with video poker and keno variants.
Directly behind that is Aces Social, a full-service sit-down restaurant with a wide-ranging menu featuring steaks, seafood, pasta, burgers, wings and more, as well as a traditional retail bar. It will be open from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and is only accessible from inside the casino.
Lucky Break Cafe, meanwhile, is open during all casino operating hours and offers quick-service food such as pizza slices, burgers, grab-and-go sandwiches and salads, ice cream, snacks and beverages, including espresso-based drinks. The casino is using Meyer Dairy ice cream and Rothrock coffee.
“We try as much as we can to partner with local brands, because we’re really a community,” he said. “I know I always get a lot of questions about what we do during big event weekends and things like that, which quite honestly is not the primary focus of why we’re here. We’re not here for these next number of home games here. We’re really here to serve the community that lives here every day.”
Just outside of Lucky Break is a self-serve station for complimentary soda, coffee and tea.
TEST DAYS
The public will get its first look inside Happy Valley Casino during the test days on Friday and Saturday, which are required by the Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board prior to opening. All proceeds from the two days will be donated to the State College Food Bank and the YMCA of Centre County.
It will be a full preview of what the casino has to offer, with the restaurants, bars, slots and table games all open, though there will be a few differences from regular operations.
Minimum bets at table games during the test days will be $5, but once fully opened they will be $15 at most tables, according to Steve Rinaldi, director of table games.
“A lot of it is to feature and showcase what we’re doing here,” Pearson said. “It’s to give the dealers an opportunity to have those two days of experiencing what it’s like to be in action. Lower limits help alleviate some of the stress and risk they’re dealing with a whole lot for the first time on that day… We want these dealers to have a long and successful career here, and so we don’t want to overwhelm them with too much.”
Pearson also said he was uncertain if the ability to order drinks directly from slot machines would be available during the test days.
The primary purpose of the test days is for the PGCB to evaluate the casino operations before opening and ensure they are in full compliance.
“We want to make sure that they’re able to operate in our gaming jurisdiction and offer fair gaming,” said Gregg Hazzuri, director of the PGCB’s Bureau of Casino Compliance. “We want to make sure that when patrons come in, they’re going to get fair, safe gaming… Make sure everything’s operating correctly, everything’s getting recorded correctly, and then all the proper procedures that they have set forth that they got approved by us and one of our other bureaus, that they’re actually performing that. And that’s the key thing because it’s those procedures that help mitigate any kind of self excluded patrons coming in, minors coming in or the casino doing anything nefarious, which I know they won’t. We’re here to make sure they aren’t and to offer a better gaming experience.”
Doug Harbach, PGCB communications director, added that compliance staff have been on site since construction began more than two years ago.
“They are here making sure that everything is progressing the way it should and they’re not doing something that wasn’t in the plans or foreseen by the Gaming Control Board,” Harbach said. “This isn’t just coming in here in the last couple of days and trying to check things out.”
Major issues are typically identified during the lead up to a casino’s opening, Hazzuri said, while deficiencies that need to be addressed can be found during test days. No Pennsylvania casino has been delayed in opening because of an issue found during test days, Harbach said.
Assuming all goes well, Pearson anticipates the casino will have a soft opening starting Monday, with a grand opening celebration planned for May 8.
EMPLOYMENT AND ECONOMIC IMPACT
Happy Valley Casino has nearly 380 part- and full-time employees at opening, with the vast majority being full-time, Pearson said. That includes 96 who graduated from the casino’s 12-week Dealer School, which will continue to operate inside the mall with its next session starting this summer.
“Hospitality can often be seen as not an exciting career path for a lot of folks,” Pearson said. “And that’s a lot of who went to our school. It’s a real wide range of different ages, different career backgrounds. Almost all come within about an hour’s drive of State College. And they’re excited to welcome real players for the first time starting [on Friday]….
“It was well in excess of like $4,000 per dealer to get them through the school. We also paid them to attend the school. And so, we really want to keep them, you know. We want this to be a real career path and rewarding position for them to have. And for the vast majority of our part time staff, they are part-time because that was their choosing. I think we offered as many full-time dealer positions as they would accept.”
The casino is also expected to create a financial windfall for College Township and Centre County.
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. The county is projected to receive the same.
A 2021 study submitted as part of the casino licensure process and at a time when the first category 4 casinos were just opening projected $1.6 million to $2 million in gaming tax revenue.
A contingent of casino detractors have maintained long-running vocal opposition to the project, saying they are skeptical of the economic benefits and that they believe those will be outweighed by gambling addiction, especially among students at nearby Penn State, an influx of crime and a strain on local resources.
Pearson, a casino industry veteran who previously served as the president and CEO of Valley Forge Casino Resort, said the opposition has been small compared to openings in other communities.
“I’ve had conversations with them… I held open sessions until they stopped showing up, which took about two or three,” he said. “A lot of what’s gotten spun up on is really a lot of bad intel is the best way I can — they sort of glom onto things or make assumptions about things and cite other resources that have no real applicability to what we’re doing here.
“Wherever I go, people are usually pretty nice to me. I never encounter anyone really outside of that very small group… Everyone I talked to was pretty excited and recognizes what this economic development can do.”
Greg Scott, president and CEO of the Chamber of Business and Industry of Centre County, said his organization believes the casino is “a good addition,” in part for the jobs it is creating, and the tax revenue it will generate.
“That’s going to benefit our communities,” Scott told StateCollege.com. “Typically these types of casinos create very little safety issues. You think, well, there’s going to be more crime. In actuality, there’s not when these mini-casinos come into a community. So I don’t think that’s going to be a burden on the community.
“And then the last piece of this is, I think in some respects it’s going to drive our tourism numbers up — people that want to come to a casino and probably will come here, maybe spend a night at a hotel. I think it’s going to help drive our hotel bed rate and bring people into our community and spend money in ways outside of the casino, too.”
THE LONG ROAD TO OPENING
Happy Valley Casino’s road to opening was a long one that publicly began when Penn State alumnus, former university trustee and investor Ira Lubert won won an auction to apply for a category 4 “mini-casino” license with a $10 million bid in August 2020.
But it started even before that, first when College Township was the only Centre Region municipality that did not opt out as a category 4 casino site during a limited window in 2017, citing the potential to revitalize the Nittany Mall. That same year, Pearson said on Thursday, Lubert began talking with him about a potential casino in the State College area.
“It’s something that’s been kicked around, and actually took me some convincing when he initially asked me about the idea,” Pearson said. “I’d never been to State College before. Obviously, now I’ve spent significant time here and it’s very tied to the community, but when he initially kicked the idea across, I did some initial demographic work and I was like,
I don’t know. He’s like, ‘no, you got to go see it.” And it wasn’t until he sort of made me come out and spend some time here in State College that I got to really understand just how underserved the whole Centre County region is for entertainment for folks in that sort of 40 to 75-plus demographic.
“It was really spending time here and seeing that that brought me to where his thinking was on it. Like this really can work. This is a massively underserved market, and I think it’s overlooked by a lot of national developers, because they did what I did. They took an initial snapshot view of the top-line demographics and then thought there is maybe a better place for us to go. But I think that people that really know Centre County and the State College region understand that there is a lot of strength in the market here that is easy to overlook if you don’t spend time.”
College Township approved land development plan for the casino in September 2021. Also in 2021, Lubert’s SC Gaming entered a framework agreement with Bally’s to jointly develop and manage the casino. Bally’s, however, withdrew from the partnership in September 2024, and about six months later, SC Gaming entered a new agreement with New York-based Saratoga Casino Holdings LLC, which is now majority owner of Happy Valley Casino.
In the meantime, the casino’s development was delayed for years after competitor Stadium Casino challenged the license, arguing that Lubert — who was eligible to bid because of his ownership interest in other Pennsylvania casino properties — acted as a “Trojan horse” for other parties, including Bally’s, who would not have been eligible and that he should not have been able to bid.
The Pennsylvania Gaming Control Board approved the license in January 2023 and the state Supreme Court dismissed the legal challenge in 2024.
Construction began in early 2025 on the estimated $120 million redevelopment of the 94,000-square-foot former Macy’s.
“All in all, I think it’s a really positive thing for our community, and I think they’ve done a tremendous job redeveloping that end of the mall,” Scott said.
