Gaming, gambling, playing faro, hazard, piquet, whist and other games in late eighteenth century Britain was probably the ruling passion across all classes, providing entertainment throughout the night. These tables, designed in a half-round segment open to a perfect circle, with rear legs that swing out to support the top. The interior playing-surfaces are lined in green baize. The activity for which the tables was designed bore no relation to the elegant marquetry inlay found on the exterior. Here, the table's inlaid decoration on the folding top and the frieze is directly inspired by classical architecture, with tablets of ram's heads, or bucrania, derived from the friezes of Roman and Greek temples. The classical decoration and fashionable very pale satinwood (it yellows with age) was intended to harmonise with the (unknown) room for which the tables were originally acquired.

The activity for which the tables were designed was quite a different matter. Fortunes were won and lost at the gaming table throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gaming took place in a semi-public way in the famous gentlemen's clubs of St James's - White's, Brooks's and Boodle's. Crowds would gather outside Brooks's on St James's Street to observe through the window the fortunes of Charles James Fox ebbing and flowing with the roll of the dice.

Women, too were important players - most famously Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, whose debts of £100,000 were inherited by her son. Historian Gillian Russell described women 'brazenly using gambling as a form of independent income, the Faro ladies brought to their class privilege the entrepreneurial instincts of the marketplace, thus making them even more of a threat to established codes of feminine behaviour'. Indeed, the female gambler was considered a potentially transgressive personality : the writer Sir Richard Steele wrote in 1713 'there is nothing that wears out a fine Face like the Vigils of the Card-Table'.

So prevalent was card-playing in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that it was encouraged as leisure activity: 'At Bath it [gambling] reigned supreme; and the physicians even recommended it to their patients as a form of distraction ... Among fashionable ladies the passion was quite as strong as among men, and the professor of whist ... became a regular attendant at their levees' (William Lecky).  Many women were involved in high-stakes gambling or 'deep-play' as it was known. Jane, Duchess of Gordon (1748-1812) the 'empress of fashion' was singled out by Horace Walpole for her determination at the tables, noting an exhausting social whirl:

'She first went to hear Handel's music in the Abbey; she then clambered over the benches and went to [Warren] Hasting's trial in the Hall - after dinner to the play, then to Lady Lucan's assembly; after that to Ranelagh, and returned to Mrs Hobart's faro table; gave a ball herself in the evening of that morning into which she must have got a good way, and set out for Scotland the next day. Hercules could not have achieved a quarter of her labours in the same space of time' (Horace Walpole, Correspondence, ed. W. S. Walpole, 48 vols, New Haven, 1937-83, II: 273-4).

The Oracle reported on the play at Lady Lucan's : 'Lady Lucan's card party last night were too full of the wonders of the Abbey [the Handel centenary concert] to play with unremitted attention—whist there might be—but it was not hush' (24 May 1791).