During my most recent visit to Las Vegas, I got to stay in the new tower at Downtown Grand. The property has been around a long time, but as the Downtown Grand has been under a bit of a renaissance of sorts in terms of property upgrades.
Its location just a block off the Fremont Street experience keeps it pretty accessible for fans of downtown Las Vegas, and for a property its size it has a pretty large inventory of hotel rooms.
Casino Floor
This is not a big casino floor – they advertise 325 machines, and they have a handful of table games, including Blackjack (with a $1 table available), craps and roulette.
The slots are overall pretty modern; they appear to have gone through a replacement cycle since my last visit in 2020. They do have some older games, like the original Gold Stacks series, but most of the games are more modern.
They’ve been tinkering with their Video Poker pay tables over the past year or two; their paytables on many games are OK but not necessarily the best on offer downtown.
The table minimums were pretty good for downtown, and were pretty accessible throughout my visit. Aside from the $1 Blackjack table they had a $15 table with 3:2 payouts for Blackjack, for instance, in line with what I have found at places like The D and Golden Gate.
Hotel Rooms
I stayed in the newest tower, the Gallery Tower, during my stay. Some rooms have new high-tech coolness going on with a virtual wall; mine was a standard room with a window, and as I was on the second floor in the back of the building my view was nothing special.
That said, I found the room quite comfortable and modern. I slept well on the bed. My only negative was there was no real working space in the room, as the only desk they had was a tiny one that went over your legs on the side couch.
Comp Program
Downtown Grand has a self-contained comp program that works similar to how Plaza’s does: $1 gets you a point on slots, $2 gets one on video poker. 250 points is worth $1 for redemption purposes.
They have three tiers in the program, with 2,500 points getting you to tier two and 25,000 points to tier three. This isn’t a particularly high bar to clear as a general rule, but for a casino that size you’re gonna have to like playing what they have enough.
Other Observations
This is a compact property; the casino floor connects directly to the Gallery Tower, walking all the way to the back where they have automated vending machines takes barely a minute, so getting around won’t be that tough. The Gallery Tower itself though is massive; that walk was easily twice as long to get to my room.
There’s a couple of food options directly on site, and they’ve affiliated with a couple of others nearby.
When I checked in they gave me a few coupons; one of them was a match play coupon where I could choose the value up to $50. That was a pretty generous offer, so be sure to review any coupons they give you upon check-in.
