An antique games table, antique card table or chess table is a highly versatile and useful item that has been bought enthusiastically by collectors for decades. Not only useful for the games that can be played (chess, backgammon, cards are the more common), these are also useful as a wine or lamp table. Games tables can be found not only in expensive cuts of mahogany and walnut, but also of exotic timbers such as rosewood, amboyna, goncales alves, kingwood, satin wood. Just as rare, some tables from even the top London makers such as Gillows were made of oak. Interestingly, antique card and games tables are usually metamorphic in some way, whether changing from a wood surface to a baize (a tea table to a card table), or from chess to back gammon, these tables work in a wonderful variety of different ways and some even have the ability to offer several different games with very extravagant metamorphic mechanisms.