Orangery Roulette

In winter the lemon trees come indoors and the orangery fills with leaves and the smell of warm glass. That is where the wheel lives: thirty-seven pockets, one green zero and a felt the colour of an olive grove. Pick a chip, place it, spin.

How to play

Choose a chip value of 5, 25, 100 or 500 Fig Coins, then tap anywhere on the table to put a chip there. Tap the same spot again to stack another on top. You can spread chips across as many numbers and boxes as you like, and the running total appears under the game.

When you are ready, press Spin. The wheel turns for a few seconds, and the number it lands on appears in the centre and at the front of the row of recent numbers. Clear lifts every chip off the table before a spin; after a spin, Repeat stake puts the same chips back on the same spots, so a favourite layout never has to be rebuilt. On a phone the table turns on its side, with the numbers running down the screen.

Reading the payouts

The payouts are the classic European ones, written “to 1”: your chip comes back along with that many more of the same size.

A single number pays 35 to 1. A 5-coin chip on 17 returns 180 when 17 comes up.
A dozen or a column pays 2 to 1. The dozens are the 1st, 2nd and 3rd 12; the columns are the three 2:1 boxes at the end of the rows.
Red or black, odd or even, 1–18 or 19–36 pay 1 to 1.

Zero is green and belongs to none of the outside bets. When the ball finds it, chips on colours, odds and evens, highs and lows, dozens and columns are all lost, and only a chip placed on 0 itself is paid.

Rounds and Fig Coins

The total on the table leaves your balance when you press Spin, and anything the number covers is paid the moment the wheel stops. With a single zero, the wheel keeps a little under three per cent for the house over a long evening. That matters not a jot when the chips are free, but it is how the real thing is built, and we would rather you knew.

If you run short, the refill button at the top restores your balance to 5,000 Fig Coins. They have no cash value and cannot be exchanged for anything at all.

From the garden notebook

The orangery was built for oranges that never really took. The lemons did, though, and so did the parties: long tables pushed together under the glass, a gramophone that only ever plays one side of one record, and at some point in the evening somebody fetching the old roulette wheel from the cupboard under the stairs.

We painted ours in terracotta and aubergine, set it on olive felt, and gave it a little green leaf for a pointer.

Questions about Orangery Roulette

Is this European or American roulette?

European: one green zero and thirty-six numbers in red and black. There is no double zero on our wheel.

Why did my chip on red go when zero came up?

Zero is neither red nor black, odd nor even, high nor low, so every outside bet is lost when it lands. Only a chip placed directly on 0 is paid.

Can I see the numbers that came up before?

Yes. The last twelve numbers sit beside the wheel, newest first, coloured red, black or green. They are a record and not a forecast: each spin knows nothing about the one before.