‘Boring’ no more? Virginia has already begun embracing casino-style gaming.

Music blared as more than a thousand people formed a long, giddy line along the front of a once-abandoned Kmart. Two racehorses paced the parking lot. A man in fox-hunting garb blew a bugle call. Cheers went up, dignitaries urged the crowd to “have some fun!” and the new Rosie’s Gaming Emporium threw open its doors.newest casinos

“Virginia is boring,” Annie Randolph, 64, a retired health-care worker shouted as she jockeyed to get inside. She had arrived more than two hours early — thrilled, she said, to finally have fun gambling without traveling to Maryland or Las Vegas.

“Keeps me from doing housework!” she said with a laugh.No, the General Assembly hasn’t made it legal to build casinos in Virginia. That debate will rage in next year’s legislative session.But casino-style gambling has come to the Old Dominion anyway, in the form of electronic games that function almost exactly like slot machines.

It’s all tied to the legislature’s effort to revive Virginia’s once-mighty horse racing industry. In authorizing a deal last year to reopen the Colonial Downs track in New Kent County, the General Assembly approved off-track facilities featuring “historic horse racing” machines.

They aren’t called slot machines — lawmakers are still wrestling with how comfortable they are opening that door. Each machine taps into a database of some 90,000 past horse races and lets the player look at blind statistics to wager on unnamed horses that might win.

If all that is too cumbersome, you can just hit the button and let colorful cherries, 7s and other symbols spin and line up. That’s what almost everyone does. And judging from the Rosie’s facilities that have opened around the state, it’s going to be a big hit.