Alien casino

I was in an alien casino type space station orbiting a planet, the aesthetic of the place was very Golden Saucer.

I was with a group of maybe 15 other people and we were given cash and some incredibly vague instructions about going off world and just having fun. The money was supplied in the same denomination order as Monopoly without 500s and a few loose coins.

We were also warned to stay away from two specific races of aliens as they were like space gangsters.

As we wandered around the casino there was also a kind of Pokémon style bounty collection program where you could catch wildlife on planets with a kind of Half-Life-esque anti gravity glove and drag them back to a kind of bathtub for submission which gave what you captured less mass and reduced its size. One member of our group upon seeing a roulette wheel put everything on black on their first spin and it landed on red, immediately bankrupting them.

We were also given pairs of glasses that has multiple functions like pausing time, slowing down time and reversing or speeding up playback but with no instructions. There were buttons recessed in the frames of the glasses and I’d figured out which combination turned them on which I traded for the knowledge of how to get off the space station lifts-like teleporters. You had to submit a fare in coins then input destinations using buttons with alien glyphs on them similar to Stargate. Return travel once at your destination was free.

Back at the animal collection/Pokémon machine a guy had tried to submit a member of one of the mobster races and ended up being submitted as a sample himself.

There was also a trivia machine where you bet, then competed with millions of other people who bet the same amount but the attrition rate was super high. You could choose when to pull out and I’d started making some money on the thing by playing it safe.