Chips carry no value
The chips are counters and nothing else. They cannot be bought, sold or exchanged for money, goods or credit, and no cash is handled in the room at any point.
Home / Card Room
After the kitchen closes, the library becomes a room given over to cards as an after-dinner pastime. It is played with symbolic chips: no money is staked, no prizes are paid, and no gambling of any kind takes place.
Symbolic chips only
The habit is old and very Veronese: after dinner nobody leaves. An amaro is ordered, a deck comes out, and the evening stretches. All we did was give that habit a proper room — two tables in cloth, eight seats each, warm light from above and a door that closes.
The game is a pretext for company. Anyone who has never played finds a beginners' table on Thursday; anyone who has played for years prefers Saturday, when the tempo gets more serious and the tone stays exactly the same.
“What you win is a conversation, not a prize.”
We describe the room plainly because the plain description is the whole point of it.
The chips are counters and nothing else. They cannot be bought, sold or exchanged for money, goods or credit, and no cash is handled in the room at any point.
Two tables, eight seats each. Because the number is small, a seat is always put aside in advance rather than found on the night.
The card room is a room, not the reason the house exists. Most guests spend an evening here without ever going upstairs, and that is entirely the idea.