THE RED LION HOTEL is a diceless narrative game in which players collectively embody a grand hotel, describing its many places and the people in them (staff members or clients). It is composed of cards, each featuring a different narrative challenge to describe a place or person in the grand hotel.

It requires 2 to 6 players or more and is designed for sessions of 60 minutes or more, with no preparation.

The game features 128 tarot-sized cards which include:

• Simple rules you can start to use as you read them collectively
• 7 "Theme" cards, to give your stories different narrative orientations
• Dozens of "Place" cards divided in four categories, ranging from the mundane to the odd, both in terms of their type and their rules of description
• Dozens of "Character" cards, to help you imagine quirky clients and inventive staff members

The base rules of THE RED LION HOTEL are easy to learn and simple to use. They can be summed up by the four actions a player can do during their turn:

• Play a new place card: the player puts a card face up on the play area, reads its rules and follow its instructions.
• Revisit an already played place: the player describes a particular event that happens in a previously described place, in freeform narration.
• Play a new character card: the player decides in which place the character is located, puts a card face up on the play area, reads its rules and follow its instructions.
• Revisit an already played character: the player brings up a previously described character and explains what they are doing in the last described place.

Apart from these actions, most of the game's delight is discovering the rules featured on every card, using a pictogram system to make them easily understandable.