The Card Room
16:00–02:006 tables2–6 players
Plain trick-taking games you can learn in five minutes and lose for years. Someone at the corner table will teach you the local rules whether you ask or not.
Social club · token games · 18+
Six rooms. Free tokens. No money anywhere.
Ember Rooms is a club you play in, not pay in. Five thousand tokens land in your account every morning, six rooms open at four, and nothing you collect at a table ever leaves the building.
Tonight
Doors 16:00
Beginners’ hour 18:00
Quiet hour 23:00
Last table 02:00
The deal
Membership Free
Tokens each day 5,000
Anything to pay No
Anything to collect No
6rooms
5,000tokens a day
10 hrsopen, 16:00–02:00
£0now and always
The room meter
How full the club gets, hour by hour
Nobody enjoys standing behind a full table. This is the average headcount across the club over the last thirty evenings, so you can pick your hour before you leave the house.
Open now — last table at 02:00
People in the club · capacity 130
See the numbers
| Hour | People | Share of capacity |
|---|---|---|
| 16:00 | 12 | 9% |
| 17:00 | 18 | 14% |
| 18:00 | 34 | 26% |
| 19:00 | 58 | 45% |
| 20:00 | 86 | 66% |
| 21:00 | 104 | 80% |
| 22:00 | 118 | 91% |
| 23:00 | 96 | 74% |
| 00:00 | 61 | 47% |
| 01:00 | 33 | 25% |
| 02:00 | 9 | 7% |
The rooms
Six rooms, six different noises
Every room keeps its own hours and its own volume. The Long Room is where people talk; the Card Room is where they stop.
The Billiard Room
16:00–02:004 tablesCues provided
Four full-size tables, re-clothed every spring. Frames are timed at forty minutes so the queue keeps moving, and the winner keeps the table twice at most.
The Domino Terrace
16:00–23:008 tablesHeated, covered
The loudest room in the club and the only one outdoors. The Thursday ladder has run for four years and the same two people have won it three times.
The Dice Table
18:00–01:001 long tableUp to 12
One long table, one running game, and a scorer who never plays. You can join between rounds and leave whenever you like; the table carries on without you.
The Long Room
16:00–02:0090 boxesQuiet after 23:00
Ninety board games on open shelves, sofas that are too comfortable, and a rule that anything opened gets put back complete before you go home.
The Counter
16:00–02:00No gamesCoffee till close
Tea, coffee, soft drinks and toast after midnight. The one room with no table to join, which is exactly why people end up talking here.
Tokens
Tokens are a counter, not a currency
There is no shop, no top-up and no way to turn a token into anything else. When you run out, you wait for the morning — and that is the whole design, not a limitation we plan to remove.
5,000Your balance resets to five thousand every day at 09:00, whether you played or not.
£0No purchases, no membership fee, no rewarded adverts, no premium room.
—Tokens cannot be sold, sent, swapped or converted, and they are worth nothing outside the club.
Tonight’s run sheet
The same shape every evening
Nothing here needs booking. Turn up at the hour and someone will already be setting the table.
16:00
All rooms
Doors and first tables
The quietest two hours of the evening. Best time to learn something new without an audience.
18:00
The Card Room
Beginners’ hour
A member teaches one game from the start, slowly, with the rules on the table. No sign-up, no cost, no shame in asking twice.
20:00
Domino Terrace
The Thursday ladder
Eight tables, one bracket, and a chalkboard nobody has replaced since 2022. Names go up until the first round starts.
21:30
The Long Room
The long game
One table, one game, played until it finishes. It has run past two in the morning four times this year.
23:00
Whole club
Quiet hour
Music off, lights down, conversation at the table only. It is the reason half the members come at all.
02:00
The Counter
Last table
Games finish, boxes go back on the shelves, and the counter serves toast to whoever is still arguing about the last round.
House rules
Four rules, and they are all about other people
Learn it, then teach it
Anyone who has played a game twice can be asked to explain it once. That is the entire membership requirement.
Phones face down at the table
Not banned in the club, just not at a table where other people are waiting for your turn.
Free a seat you are not using
Step away for more than fifteen minutes and the seat goes back to the room. Your tokens stay where they are.
Nothing changes hands
No selling tokens, no lending accounts, no arrangements about who collects what. It ends a membership on the spot.
18+
Members are 18 or over, and the club watches the clock
Nothing in the club is played for money and nothing pays out, but the evenings are long and easy to lose. After an hour at a table your screen shows how long you have been playing today, and you can close your own account for 24 hours, 30 days or permanently from your settings — we will not ask why and we will not invite you back. If the time you spend here has stopped feeling like your choice, write to [email protected] and we will close the door for you.
Around the club
Tables, tokens and the counter at midnight
