Councilors in the city of Prague have voted to ban gaming clubs from the capital of the Czech Republic.

On Thursday, the Prague City Assembly surprised onlookers by voting to ban gaming clubs offering video lottery terminals (VLT). Prague’s mayor, Adriana Krnáčová, had originally proposed amending the city’s gambling laws to achieve a reduction in the number of VLT venues but councilors got a little carried away and decided to ban the lot.

The ban isn’t quite as absolute as it sounds, as around 100 officially designated ‘casinos’ will be allowed to carry on business as usual. But 212 smaller ‘gaming clubs’ are facing the axe, many of them on Jan. 1, 2016 when the measure goes into effect. Other affected venues will close within the next year or so as their licenses expire and are not renewed.

Ondřej Mirovský, the deputy mayor of Prague 7 district, said the measure was intended to get rid of the kind of “dirty venues” that had proliferated in recent years. In proposing the original reduction in the number of clubs, Mayor Krnáčová had linked the venues with “a number of sociological and pathological phenomena.”