About this guide

About the Glyph Workshop

The Glyph Workshop writes and signs Nine Glyphs as a group, and no page bears the name of a single author. The guide draws the nine Metro Vancouver casinos it covers as glyphs, one small sign for each, built from its published facts.

By the Glyph WorkshopChecked October 7, 2026

Why glyphs

Nine casinos in Metro Vancouver keep very different hours, tables and services. In prose, those differences are hard to compare. The Glyph Workshop draws each one as a shape built only from published facts, so the nine can be read side by side.

Each glyph has seven rays, one for each day of the week. A ray's length is the hours the floor is open that day. An inner ring shows live table hours. Four dots at the rim mark a poker room, a hotel, a racebook or simulcast, and a transit hub within 1 km. Some marks stay empty: table hours are published for 4 of the nine.

The Glyph Workshop's code plots the glyphs and the map from published facts and coordinates, so they portray no place. Two casino pictures are generated images made from real photographs: Cascades Casino Langley's steak and seafood restaurant patio and Elements Casino Surrey's front. Neither is a photograph or carries a caption; each view shifts slightly from the original camera spot and hour. The remaining five come from Wikimedia Commons and Flickr under free licences, with photographer and licence named beneath each one. Those credits return with links in the Image sources list lower on the page, and no person appears in any picture.

Image sources

Parq Vancouver tower seen from below (Parq): Photo: GoToVan, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).
Hastings Racecourse sign at the Hastings Park gate (Hastings): Photo: Mike W., CC BY-SA 2.0, via Flickr (cropped).
River Rock sign tower and the Oak Street Bridge (River Rock): Photo: Mathew5000, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).
Tug and barge on the Fraser by River Rock (River Rock): Photo: Blake Handley, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr (cropped).
A plate of fried squid, chicken and potatoes (River Rock): Photo: Dennis Sylvester Hurd, CC0 1.0, via Flickr (cropped).

How the facts are checked

The facts here were compared on October 7, 2026, with the casinos' own pages and with official sources. Automated reading is blocked by some casino sites. In those cases the facts were read from saved archive copies of the identical pages.

Transit hubs come from TransLink's GTFS feed, the open data behind its schedules. The guide measures a straight line from each casino's map point to the SkyTrain stations and bus exchanges in it. These are not driving or walking distances. Gaps are never filled in: a dashed ray marks unpublished floor hours, including the unstated first hours of Monday on the Elements Casino Surrey glyph. A hollow dot means the facts do not list that feature.