Close Quarters / About this guide
About the Map Room
Checked October 8, 2026By the Map Room
Close Quarters is written and signed under a collective name, The Map Room, and none of its pages bears a personal byline. This page sets out why the guide exists and how it is kept honest.
Why a map of neighbours
Nine casinos sit on the Close Quarters map, and they are not spread evenly. Cowboys Casino, Elbow River Casino and ACE Casino Blackfoot stand within 2.5 km of each other in a straight line. The Map Room calls them the central trio. ACE Casino Airport and Century Downs, the north pair, are 7.8 km apart as the crow flies. Stoney Nakoda Resort & Casino stands far to the west, 61.6 km in a straight line from Grey Eagle, its nearest neighbour.
At a radius of 3 km, the trio forms one group and the other six stand alone. Widen it to 8 km and four groups appear. The guide exists to answer a plain question: what stands next to what. That matters when one casino is closed or simply not the right fit.
The Map Room signs the guide as a collective. Close Quarters accepts no wagers, keeps no player accounts and runs no cashier.
How the map is kept
Each casino gets one point on the map, taken from OpenStreetMap: the building outline or the casino node. Distances between those points are straight lines, computed with the haversine formula. They say nothing about roads, driving or transit. A crow would find them accurate; a car would not.
Hours, games and other venue details come from each casino's own pages, the AGLC casino directory and news reports. Every check is dated. Where a casino's own pages give two versions of a figure or of its hours, the Map Room leaves that figure out rather than pick one.
Some work the guide leaves alone on purpose. It does not rank casinos or call one better than another. It knows nothing about road layouts, traffic, parking queues or how busy a venue is. So it gives no drive times and no guesses about crowds.
Lines, glass and hills
The line maps and the weekly charts are drawn by the Map Room from its own data. Two real photographs of the venues were remade by an image model. One shows the Cowboys Casino facade in downtown Calgary at golden hour. The other shows the lounge chairs above the gaming floor at ACE Casino Airport. The camera moves only a little from where the original stood, the light changes, and people, cars and a food truck are left out.
These two images are not photographs. The glass droplets and the foothills landscape were generated from a written description alone, and the landscape shows no casino. Nothing on the site was taken with a camera. Generated pictures carry no caption, so this page does the explaining for them.
Questions
Is the Map Room a person?
The Map Room is not a person. It is the collective name Close Quarters is written and signed under. There is no named author behind the site, and its pages carry no personal byline.
Does the Map Room work for a casino?
The Map Room does not work for any casino. Close Quarters stands on its own, with no tie to any operator or venue. Venues, operators, the province and help services all pay this site nothing, not a single cent from any of them. Paid links appear nowhere except the home page; each is marked Ad and points to an online casino partner.