Biloxi was a resort town for a century before it was a gambling town, and it became a gambling town on a specific date. In June 1990 the Mississippi legislature passed the Gaming Control Act, allowing counties along the Mississippi River and the Gulf Coast to vote themselves dockside casinos. Harrison County voted yes. In August 1992 the Isle of Capri opened on the Biloxi waterfront as the first legal casino in the state, and within a decade the city's economy had been rebuilt around an industry that had not existed here in living memory.
The word that mattered in that law was dockside. Gaming had to happen on water. So the casinos were barges: floating steel boxes moored against the shore with the hotel, the restaurants and the car park on dry land behind them. Anyone who visited before 2005 remembers walking down a covered ramp from the lobby onto a vessel.
On 29 August 2005 Hurricane Katrina demonstrated what a moored barge does in a twenty-two foot storm surge. They came off their moorings. One of them ended up on the construction site of the art museum half a mile inland. In a special session that autumn the legislature changed the rule, permitting coastal casinos to rebuild on land within eight hundred feet of the shoreline.
Every large building on the beach road today is a consequence of those two votes, fifteen years apart. That is the whole architectural explanation for this city's skyline.
Which casinos are actually in Biloxi
Eight casino resorts sit inside the Biloxi city limits by the city's own count. The largest and best known are Beau Rivage, opened by Steve Wynn's Mirage Resorts in March 1999 and at twenty-nine storeys still the tallest building in Mississippi; Hard Rock Biloxi, which was days away from opening when Katrina hit and finally opened in July 2007; and Golden Nugget, which is the descendant of that first 1992 Isle of Capri after the storm, a sale and a rebrand.
Which town is it actually in
It matters, because visitors book on a map. Island View is in Gulfport. Scarlet Pearl and Wind Creek are in D'Iberville, across the Back Bay. Hollywood is out at Bay St Louis, forty minutes west. All of them are on this coast; none of them is in Biloxi, and if you booked a Biloxi hotel and a show at one of the others, you have a drive.
What the buildings are for if you do not gamble
This is the part nobody explains, and it is the reason a non-gambling family can have a very good cheap holiday in a casino city.
The room is a loss leader. These resorts compete with each other for people who will spend money inside the building, so a beachfront room midweek in January can cost less than an inland chain motel does in July. The rest of the property is built to keep you there: multiple restaurants, a buffet in most, a pool, a spa, a cinema or an arcade in some, and a showroom that books touring acts who would otherwise play a much larger city.
Parking is generally free, valet included, at most of the strip properties, and you do not have to be a hotel guest. Compare that with any other gambling destination in the country.
| If you want | What to do on the strip |
|---|---|
| A cheap comfortable room | Book midweek, outside October and Carnival. Ask what the resort fee is |
| Dinner without planning | Most properties run several restaurants at different price points |
| A show | Showrooms here book national touring acts. Check age policy when you buy |
| A pool day in bad weather | Several properties have indoor or covered pool areas |
| To actually gamble | Read the next section first |
| None of the above | Park free, walk through, look at the building, leave. Nobody minds |
The rules that catch visitors out
- Twenty-one to gamble, and it is enforced. Mississippi's gaming age is 21. Children may cross a gaming floor to reach a lift, a restaurant or a pool, which in most of these buildings is unavoidable, but they cannot stop, sit at a machine or stand watching a table.
- Carry photo identification, even if you are obviously over 21. You will need it to collect a jackpot, open a players account or, in some properties, enter a bar area.
- Most floors permit smoking. This is the single biggest complaint from visitors who have not been to a Mississippi casino before. At least one Biloxi property has run entirely smoke-free, and non-smoking sections exist elsewhere, but assume the default here is different from a Las Vegas resort built in the last decade.
- Photography on the gaming floor is usually restricted. Ask before you film.
- The cash machine on the floor is the most expensive one you will use all year. Get cash before you arrive.
- Resort fees and parking policies change. They are set by each operator and revised. Confirm at the property rather than trusting any published figure, including ours.
The honest paragraph about the maths
Every game on that floor is designed so that the building keeps a percentage of everything wagered, over time, with certainty. That is not a scandal; it is the business model, and it is printed in the regulations. The house edge varies by game and, on many machines, by denomination, and the longer you play the more reliably the arithmetic asserts itself.
A players card is not a gift. It is a tracking device, and it works out what to offer you from what the operator expects to win from you over time. The free room is real, and so is the calculation behind it.
Set the number you are willing to lose before you go in, take that in cash, and leave the card in the hotel room. The state licenses every operator here and requires responsible-gambling information to be posted; a national problem gambling helpline runs around the clock, Mississippi operates a voluntary self-exclusion scheme, and the cage staff at any property can tell you how to use either.
What the industry did to the city
Worth knowing while you stand in the lobby. Gaming taxes fund a substantial share of municipal budgets on this coast and the industry is one of the largest private employers in Harrison County. The casino jobs are the reason a good deal of the housing rebuilt after 2005 is here at all.
It is also a monoculture with an obvious vulnerability, and this coast has watched it demonstrated twice: once in 2005, when every floor closed at once, and again during the closures of 2020. Biloxi knows this about itself. It is one of the reasons the city has spent twenty years trying to rebuild the seafood industry, the museums and the sports team alongside the gaming floor rather than in its shadow.
Staying at a casino resort with children
It works, with a little management, and plenty of families do it because the rooms are cheap and the pools are good.
The one unavoidable friction is the floor itself. In most of these buildings the lifts, the restaurants and the pool are reached by crossing gaming space. Walking through is fine. Stopping is not, and staff will say so politely and immediately.
Practical arrangements that help: ask at check-in for a room on a tower floor away from the showroom, because a concert ends late and the corridors are lively afterwards. Find out where the non-gaming route to the pool is, if there is one. Check the arcade and cinema situation before you book, since it differs by property. And ask the age policy for any show you buy tickets to, because it varies by act rather than by venue.
Two nearby alternatives are worth knowing about. The children's museum in Gulfport and the aquarium on the Gulfport beachfront are both about twenty-five minutes west and are the strongest wet-weather options on this coast.
The Back Bay casinos and why they feel different
Not every property on this coast is on the beach road. Several sit on the Back Bay, the sheltered water on the north side of the Biloxi peninsula, and they are a different proposition.
The beach-road resorts are big, tall and aimed at the visitor market: showrooms, spas, several restaurants, a view of the Sound. The Back Bay properties are generally smaller, closer to where people live, and busier with locals than with tourists on a weeknight. If you want to see what the industry looks like as an ordinary part of a working city rather than as a holiday, that is where to look.
Practically, they are five to ten minutes from the strip by car and parking is just as easy. The trade-off is that you will not walk between them, and you will not be walking to the beach either.
Last updated
Opening hours, ordinances and prices move with the season. We re-check this guide rather than rewrite it, and the date above is the last time someone did. How we research and correct.
