Penn National Gaming was the sole bidder on Wednesday and picked up its fourth state casino license.

Penn National’s bid was just $3 over the $7.5 million minimum for the mini-casino license.

The company hasn’t picked a specific location yet, but the general area Penn National identified seems to ensure it’ll be built in southern Berks County, either in the city of Reading, its suburbs or along a section of the Pennsylvania Turnpike.

Penn National’s flagship, Hollywood Casino is near Hershey, about 25 miles west of Reading. Spokesman Eric Schippers says Penn National hopes the mini-casino’s location will protect Hollywood Casino from competition while drawing patrons from suburban Philadelphia and the Reading and Lancaster areas.

The strategic locating of casinos and mini-casinos reminds us of the opening placement of armies in the popular board game called Risk. The object of Risk is to defend and strengthen your assets, weaken your enemy and expand your territory. It’s like Monopoly, only with armies instead of dollars and hotels

The ongoing auctions of casino licenses is a little reminiscent of the “Walking Purchase” of 1737, a land swindle perpetrated by John and Thomas Penn, the sons of Pennsylvania founder William Penn. They produced a 1686 treaty in which the Lenape tribe agreed to sell land from present-day Easton to point one and half days’ walk west. When the Lenape agreed to honor it, the Penn brothers cleared a westward path, hired the four fastest runners in the colony and offered 400 acres to the one who could go the greatest distance in 36 hours.

The land-grab cost the Lenape Indians roughly 1.2 million acres — a chunk of property the size of Rhode Island — encompassing all of present-day Pike, Monroe, Carbon, Schuylkill, Northampton, Lehigh and Bucks counties.

Would that we inherited more of William Penn’s noble qualities and fewer of his sons’ deceits, we might be better at governing ourselves.

Maybe Pennsylvania should draw its congressional and legislative districts the way it places casinos: by auctioning the rights to the highest bidder.

Then again, we just watched about $12 million spent in the campaign for Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District — and the highest spending party’s candidate, Republican Rick Saccone, lost the election.

A gamble is never a sure thing.