It's always either feast or famine for the casino industry's prospects in the Sunflower State. A week ago, there was one in-progress project, Butler National's low-cost Dodge City casino and almost nothing else. Now, with the window of opportunity slamming shut (again) for Wyandotte County, a slew of applicants has skittered over the sill.

First in was Cordish Co., making good on its promise to be back with a downsized proposal for the Kansas Speedway. A $390 million Hard Rock-branded casino will be the entirety of Phase One, with the hotel and all other amenities to emerge at an unspecified future point. Yesterday, Penn National Gaming got back into the act, pitching a $500 million iteration of its Hollywood Casino brand. It'd be a full-service product (hence the higher price tag) but Penn's noblesse oblige attitude and its abrogation of a casino development it had been awarded in Cherokee County may still rankle the Kansas Lottery Commission. It blanked Penn in the previous round of bidding.

Hard on Penn's heels comes Las Vegas-based Golden Gaming, which lost to Cordish by one vote last time around. Its proposal is Cordish-like in terms of proposing a $360 million casino (with restaurants and entertainment venues) to be eventually followed by another $300 million in augmentations. These would include an expansion of the casino from 2,000 slots to 2,500 and from 65 table games to 98. Also promised are "a 300-room hotel, spa, restaurants, retail shops, convention and meeting space, an 18-hole championship Tom Watson golf course, 60-lane bowling alley, entertainment venues and more."

(Boy, $660 million sure goes a lot farther in Kansas than it does in Vegas. Here, all it gets you is Aliante Station.)

Golden's would-be project, to be sited along I-70 near Edwardsville, is Cordish-like but arguably Cordish Lite, too. Allying itself with the speedway and sublicensing the Hard Rock brand gives Cordish two sharp arrows in its quiver. It'll take some pretty strong argumentation by Golden to persuade Lottery commissioners to reverse their earlier preference for the Baltimore-based developer, which can now also point to the early success of its Indiana Live! racino as further evidence of its suitability. In Round One, last year, the vote between Cordish, Golden and Penn went 4-3-0 in Cordish's favor. It's the latter's game to lose.

Over in Sumner County, previous applicant Equity Ventures has been pawing the ground for a while now. It's hedging its bet by optioning two sites but one of them is entangled in litigation due to the City of Mulvane's attempt to grab, er, annex it. (Way to improve that tax base, guys!) Jilted partner of Harrah's Entertainment, which retreated from Kansas last year, Equity's profile got higher this week when former Mandalay Resort Group CEO Mike Ensign turned up at the helm.

After a bit of hemming and hawing, Foxwoods Development is returning to the fray, too. It's making the argument that it can get a casino on line quickly and inexpensively, probably in the $225 million neighborhood. Squeaking in just under the wire is Lakes Entertainment, coming off a rebuff by Ohio voters last November. Like the Ensign group, Lakes is opting for a parlay of sites, one of them in Wellington.

The state ought to have fun sorting out what are, in effect, five proposals. Equity has the theoretical advantage of representing the core of the joint venture that won the bidding last year (presuming that Harrah's defection hasn't left a sour aftertaste). Foxwoods, despite recent economic misfortunes in Connecticut, still owns the longest and strongest track record. Promising an operational casino lickety-split is music to tax-starved bureaucrats' ears, too. Lakes has the site (Wellington) that's been bruited as the Lottery's Sumner County Commission's location of preference. This one's impossible to call.

That leaves orphaned Cherokee County, where bidding remains open for another three weeks. Anybody ... anybody at all? Don't everyone jump up at once, now ...