Ground floor, at the back, past the drying room
The Treeplay Room
This is a room of this house. The casino is not a separate business, not a partner operation and not another address: it is the back room on the ground floor, under the same roof as the kitchen and the eleven beds, and you reach it without stepping outside. Before 1979 it weighed freight off the floatplane dock.
From the desk in the hall you turn left, pass the drying room door, and the entrance is thirty steps along on the right. Somebody stands at that door the whole time the casino is open. They are there to look at identification, and they do it every single time.
The room
Nine tables stand on the old concrete floor, arranged along the line of the freight counter rather than across it, because the channel cut for runoff still crosses the slab and nobody wanted a table leg in it. On a Thursday in February four tables are working. On a Saturday in August all nine are, and the casino turns people away at about half past nine.
The walls are the original board and batten, the ceiling is open to the joists, and two fans move air that the single window cannot. There is no music, which surprises people who expected a casino to have some. There is a clock on the end wall and the staff are told to say the time out loud to anyone who asks, immediately and without finishing what they were doing. Rooms like this one are known for hiding clocks, so ours is where you walk in.
Dry clothes and shoes, and that is a rule with a reason rather than a standard. The covered pool is forty metres from the door along the same corridor, and without saying it plainly we would spend every August evening explaining why a wet towel is not suitable in a casino with a concrete floor and nine tables.
Age and identification
British Columbia sets the line at 19, and the casino applies it with nothing bent for anyone. Not for a guest of the house, not for somebody who has stayed every year since 1990, and not on a quiet Thursday when the room is half empty.
Identification is checked every time you come through the door, not once per stay. The person who had dinner at the long table an hour ago shows it again on the way into the casino. A photograph of a document on a telephone is not a document. What works is a passport, a driving licence, or a provincial identification card, in your hand.
Nobody under 19 comes in at any hour, and that includes the hours when the room is shut and being cleaned. There is no tour, no quick look from the doorway, and no exception for a parent who wants to show a child what the old freight office looks like now.
Limits and stopping
A limit is set by the people working the casino floor, in the room, before you sit down. Say the figure out loud, they write it in the book behind the bar, and they hold you to it for the evening. If you don't raise it, they will: it is the second question at the table, after your name.
Stopping is arranged at the desk in the hall, in person, and nowhere else. Not at the casino table, not by telephone, and not through this site. It takes effect the same evening. Lifting it means walking back to the same desk in person, and there is no shorter route, on purpose.
There is no credit in the room. The casino does not hold money for you between visits, does not lend, and does not take an IOU written on anything. There is no cash machine in this building or anywhere on the plot, and the nearest one is in town, nine minutes away by car.
This website offers no gaming
What this page describes is a land-based casino room in a house on the inlet road in Tofino, British Columbia. That is the whole of it. The site describes the room and the building around it. It runs no games, takes no bets, opens no accounts, holds no balances and moves no money in any direction.
To play you travel to the inlet road, come through the front door, walk thirty steps past the drying room, show a document to the person standing there, and sit down. There is no other way in, and no part of it happens on this page.