In the accompanying discussion Extensions to the Casino Minigame, mattklose says:

Originally posted by mattklose:

Orteil has mentioned that he has plans for a minigame for every building, which naturally includes the Chancemaker. This means that, at some point in the future, the Casino mod will become obsolete, which is kind of a downer.

It is indeed! But I don't see the obsolescence of the Casino as being a necessary outcome here. Instead, I see three possibilities where the Casino can continue and thrive. At least one of these is definitely possible.

Before introducing these three alternatives, I would like to say that the reason they are possible at all is due to the high quality of work in mattklose's implementation of the Casino. The user interface is excellent, and the game is a rather faithful implementation of standard blackjack, with some optional features being available as upgrades. These factors, along with some extensions I have made and the possibility of future extensions, make me think that the Casino is an ideal minigame for Cookie Clicker.

Here are the three ways that I think the Casino minigame can continue to live and even grow, regardless of what Orteil decides to do.

1. From what I have seen, although Orteil wants to include minigames for each building, I haven't seen any evidence that he has already decided which minigame he wants to implement for all 16 buildings (in the new version) that don't currently have one. Adding 16 new minigames is going to take a while - undoubtedly years. For this reason, I don't see even a potential conflict with the Casino arising anytime soon.
   
   When you think of what type of minigame would be most appropriate for the Chancemaker, what's the first thing that comes to mind? A game of chance, of course. And IRL, if you want to go somewhere to play games of chance, what's your top choice for a place to go? A casino. Or for those for whom this is not very practical, maybe an online casino. So a casino minigame is a real natural for the Chancemaker, and we have a fully functioning one here already. Granted, it contains only one game right now, but mattklose included a stub in the code for other games, and I'm willing to bet (if you'll excuse the expression) that he has ideas for other games that could be implemented if the future of the Casino could be guaranteed. I certainly do, and I'll detail these later.
   
   So the first option would simply be to convince Orteil that the Casino is the Chancemaker minigame that he's looking for. I'm fairly sure that he would want to make some changes to the basic game so that it fulfills his definition of not containing any cheats. This would make the basic game more challenging, but "more challenging" can also mean "more fun" if done properly, and Orteil has certainly demonstrated that he has the talent for doing just that.
   
   Meanwhile, any features of the current game that would have to be turned off to maintain a "no cheating" status could still remain and be optional, but if the player tried to turn them on, they would first be warned that enabling such features would disable Steam achievements, and they would be given a chance to cancel their decision. In this way, the full feature set of the Casino (including any future expansions) could be made available to players without forgoing the ability to retain Steam achievements for players who want them.
   
   Another somewhat minor point that I think would need to be addressed would be the icons for achievements and upgrades. Personally, I am no more skilled at creating these things than mattklose. But it occurred to me that a very simple way to give each achievement and upgrade its own unique icon that also identifies it as being part of the Casino is to use playing cards for the icons. What do you think, mattklose?
   
   Overall, I think there is a very powerful argument here for making the Casino the official Chancemaker minigame. But as Groucho Marx once said, "Those are my principles! And if you don't like them... well, I have others." Here are the others:
   
   
2. If Orteil has a completely different idea for a minigame that he wants to implement for the Chancemaker, then I don't see that that presents a problem at all. There is no technical reason why a building can't have multiple minigames, nor does the number of minigames even need to be limited to two. It might be easier to implement such a multi-minigame feature so that only one minigame could be active at a time, with the state of any other minigames retained until they were next activated. I think that that would be quite acceptable. But I don't think it would be that difficult to implement multiple minigames in a way that two or more of them could be active at the same time. We already have this for the current minigames; this would just have to be adjusted so that it works for minigames connected to the same building. I think that there's a good chance that Orteil would be open to this, in which case the Casino part of the multi-minigame approach could be handled as in the first option.
   
   
3. If Orteil doesn't like either of the first two options, it would still be possible for us to implement Option 2 on our own. Orteil has shown himself to be extremely tolerant of what is added to the game, and I don't think that anything here even starts to push the boundaries on that level. So if neither Option 1 nor Option 2 interests Orteil, Option 3 is always available to us. For this reason, I think that a long and happy future is available to the Casino, regardless of Orteil's plans.