Whatever those dolls may be, however discovered and wherever encountered, you think of them as game pieces. You are as certain of this as of any fact relating to them, a pointless certainty, one of your own instincts rather than of any properties of the dolls themselves.
It is also certainly incorrect. Looking now, rationally, at that room of first-encounter, call it that, you remember, or have inserted, so many other games in amongst them that you have created a context for it, false or otherwise. You believe that either you see now as you look back, or saw at the time but have since forgotten, now recalled, a deep drawer, laid open, apparently of wood or strong cardboard. That too seems unlikely, nevertheless you see or remember or assume something flimsy-sided and bottomless, in the mundane sense, four-sided only, although that too is a guess since you can and could see only the front and sides, a rectangular trough. It appeared to be, rather than a drawer, an apparatus for sieving out game boards and figurines from the hole at the bottom of itself, the distance from floor to drawer being slight but large enough for this purpose. You see it, thus described and bounded, full of board and table games and figurines. Perhaps it too was some drawer from somewhere else entirely, or not a drawer at all, for why would a drawer be broken or purposely structured in such a manner yet be put to so inappropriate a use? You are assuming that those who used the room were lifters-out of things in drawers, as you believe yourself to be, and as you believe all others to be, but you are also aware that this may be some cultural or other bias on your part. Nevertheless, discounting the possibility of the falseness of the whole construct, you consider that it is most likely that the drawer too is simply misplaced within your own personal sense of time and location along with the chessmen, and you continue to call them chessmen even though they were not. It is a cascade of failed associations, or simply associations overmade, or perhaps it is all true and every piece correct, as far as it goes.
It seems unlikely, given the character of those involved in that meeting that such things would be there, in that waiting room, or vestibule, at that time and displayed in such a manner for your perusal. But no-one from that group owned those rooms. This is a new realisation, albeit something that you have always had the capacity to infer, and yet you did not, or do not remember having done so. Of course no-one there owned or was in any other way associated with those rooms, except insofar as they had use of them, or perhaps were regulars. Perhaps you are wrong again and they may indeed have been full owners in whatever that place was, which you do not recall, but you had and have no reason to think so, or at least can think of no such reason now.
You can certainly recall similar situations in the past where you have so entwined facts and suppositions in your head, the place and the people you happened to meet there, or rather those people and the place you happened to meet them, or people you have met who are synonymous in your memory with the place they inhabited either most often or exclusively in your encounters. Indeed you can recall others who have been so defined by you, a person-of-a-place, but who were encountered only latterly in the location that you have set aside in your memory. The place was waiting there in your future, relatively speaking, for the person to later be fit into it. And yet not always even that, fitness or aptness is only obvious in a very few cases, now that you audit yourself it seems more likely that some clash with the environments that their memory selves inhabit is the real trigger. You have placed them there anyway, or if not you then some process of your internals of which you are not consciously aware.