Can I Solo No-Tell Motel?
No-Tell Motel, by Ken Lowery (publishing as Bannerless Games), is a solo game about spying on the guests of a motel to solve—well, "solve"—a murder mystery. It's a smallish game, length-wise, being a 34-page zine. You play as the overnight clerk of a sleazy motel, and use a standard deck of cards (and a d6) to generate a random murder victim and then random activities and connections for your Guests.
Once you've got your victim, No-Tell Motel's core gameplay loop is: check in a random number of guests for the night; draw cards to determine what those people do during your three night shifts; check all your guests out in the morning; repeat. There's also some rolling to find out if guests leave or check in during the night, and on some nights extra events happen.
I first heard about this game from (the headline of) the review in Rascal News, but, honestly, I wasn't that interested on first glance! Most mystery TTRPGs, especially the kind currently in vogue (your Brindlewood Bays and such), are simply not my thing; I like the mystery genre in other mediums because I like feeling like I'm solving a puzzle, and many mystery TTRPGs are more interested in telling a mystery-flavored story than they are in presenting an actual mystery for the players to solve in real life. This just doesn't really appeal to me.
But! When I suggested No-Tell Motel to someone recently for trick-or-treat, I actually read the full game description, and that's when I learned it mostly isn't about solving (or pretending to solve) a mystery. It's about gossip.
Here's a fun fact about me: I love gossip. I love knowing stuff about people (secrets especially). As a TTRPG player, I'd say a lot of my time is spent trying to learn everything I can about every character around: PCs, NPCs, whoever. I'm nosy down to my core. (I should maybe say that I do respect people's privacy in real life. I'm just very curious.) Unrelatedly, I also love motels. Maybe it's that I love traveling, or did pre-plague? Maybe it's that nobody can possibly expect me to answer emails while I'm in a motel? Maybe it's that, like diners, motels (even bad motels) are soothingly reliable, and always kind of the same? Who can say. So a game about motels and gossip? Sign me up.
I played through two sessions of No-Tell Motel, each of which took 2-3 hours. At the end of those two sessions, I found myself about halfway to being able to accuse someone of the murder, and realized that 1) I didn't particularly want to play for another 4-6 hours, for reasons I'll explain shortly, and 2) I have a (digital) con* this weekend, so even if I did want to play for that long, it's just not practical.
* Con Zero, by the way, which is a terrific free online TTRPG con that you should all go to. I went to the first one and had a wonderful time, and there are lots of great games, panels, and social events at this one too.
So I stopped playing there. Which is not, I think, any negative judgment on the game itself. Let's get into it!
Can you play a paladin? LOL, no. Paladin of nosiness maybe. I do feel like nobody with a firm purpose in life would do any of the stuff you do in this game. (Not a value judgment on motel clerks or this game.)
Are there defined and achievable goals?
Sort of! You are, in theory, trying to solve a murder. Or at least build a convincing case that someone is the murderer. Defined? Certainly. Achievable? Well, yes, eventually, although I did not, actually, achieve it. More on that later.
Is there crunch and tactical gameplay?
Tactics no. Which is fine. It's not that kind of game. Crunch, though, oddly…kinda! In terms of having a lot of stuff to keep track of, anyway. There are no numbers, but boy is there a lot of stuff to keep track of. The red-string conspiracy board of the mind is FULL of stuff, in this game. For that, let's talk about what you, the player, actually do in No-Tell Motel.
Is this a journaling game?
It is! But in this case I didn't dislike that. Very surprising.
Three times a night, you draw a card for each of the guests currently in your motel. Each card corresponds to something you learn about that guest: they do something weird, they get into an altercation with another guest (or you!), they have some kind of visitor, or you learn a scandalous rumor about them. Each card gives you some concrete information (e.g. "the guest grabs an extinguisher to put out a small fire"), and a prompt ("going by the smell, what burned?").
So it is a lot of journaling. But! In this case, the journaling is diegetic: you (the night clerk) are recording your observations of these guests in your room ledger and your collection of dossiers for these guests. So I had an actual, physical little notebook with a page for each guest full of my observations about them, and an actual, physical ledger to record check-ins, and so on. This is much more fun, to me, than just making stuff up and writing it down out-of-character.
Also—here's what I often don't like about journaling games: it's that line-crossing feeling, where having to author the world makes it harder for me to react to that world. (Apologies once again to John Harper, who specifically said that blog post isn't about games in general and yet I'm always using it to talk about games in general.) In No-Tell Motel, baseless speculation is the point, and is, again, diegetic. Your character the night clerk also just doesn't have a lot of information, and is drawing their own wild, probably-inaccurate conclusions from stuff they hear secondhand (or see at a distance, etc). So the game isn't asking you to actually author the actual truths of the world. Just to project and make stuff up, in character. For me, this was fun and immersive in a way journaling games usually are not.
Is this a bunch of random tables?
It is, yeah. There are sixteen NPCs (one for every face card in a standard deck of playing cards), and you draw cards in various ways to determine who the murder victim is, who was at the motel on the night of the murder, and who checks into your motel every night. Every shift, you draw from the rest of the deck and consult a big random table to determine what happens to each guest. Every fourth night, you roll your d6 and consult another random table for a special event (convention in town, bad weather, etc). And then when you get to the end, there's yet another random table (well, two) for the epilogue. It's a lot of random tables.
As I'm always saying, though: some random tables are good, if they're coherent and flavorful. And these are! The NPCs (mostly archetypes from pulp and murder mysteries, like "the tabloid reporter" or "the recently divorced" or "the vice detective") are all interesting, and the events are all thoroughly realistic but also salacious. Who among us has not been at a motel and seen somebody kicking a vending machine or ranting at a beleaguered clerk or making a sketchy deal in the parking lot? I don't know about you all, but when I see such a thing in real life, I absolutely make up a little narrative in my head for what scandalous thing is secretly going on with that person. No-Tell Motel wants you to take that urge to the maximum, and the random tables are thoughtfully designed to encourage that. Each shift really did feel like I was people-watching at a seedy motel. Great stuff.
Here, though, we do also run into the reason that I stopped playing without getting to the epilogue. The randomness itself was not a problem for me: people, in real life, are always doing wild shit without apparent rhyme or reason, especially at motels. We can never understand what's in a passing stranger's heart. That's fine. I think my problem was with the size of the random tables, relative to the length of the game.
The thing about a standard deck of cards is…it's pretty small. If you take only the number cards (the ones that, in No-Tell Motel, determine the nightly events), there's only 36. Which may sound like a lot—and it is a lot, in terms of events to think up and put in a game. But every night has, on average, 10ish events total, which means that, actually, there's a very high (like, 95%) chance you'll get repeating events, even just on the first two nights. This was mostly fine; it is funny and interesting (to me) to watch three different NPCs make sketchy parking lot deals or shout at their neighbors, and it did successfully lead me to imagine a tangled web of various weird and scandalous connections between the NPCs, which was also fun.
My trouble came with the murder mystery of it all. By the end of my second session, I was six full nights in, and only halfway to being able to turn someone in for the murder—my best suspect had 3 out of the 6 Motive you need to file a report, to put it in specific game mechanics terms. And, by that point, with only nine motives available, I had pulled all the same motive cards several times. The first few repeats were okay; if two different people knew the murder victim way back when, that's interesting, and I can imagine a coherent (well, conspiracy-minded) narrative for that. But if everyone and their cat seemingly fought with the murder victim over money…well…it no longer felt like I was learning new and interesting stuff, and no longer felt like I was building a fun little conspiracy narrative about the murder. Instead, it felt like the more I learned about the murder, the more my narrative fell apart.
I do think this is kind of the point of the game. I mean, it does say, specifically, "As the nights wear on, doubt will creep in, and certainty will become an illusion." Sure. Promise fulfilled, I guess. But like—"nothing makes sense and I hear the same things over and over again" is not a particularly fun feeling, for me. It's also not very satisfying for me in terms of murder-mystery genre! Also, I really enjoyed the very distinct-feeling NPCs at the start of the game, and having those NPCs all eventually do the same things and be associated with the same rumors made them feel less real and distinct. It no longer felt like I was observing real weirdos at a motel—which, in real life, is a near-endless source of deeply surprising and unique behavior—and felt more like I was, well, consulting a random table of generic Motel Activities.
Maybe this is also the point of the game! Maybe all guests really are the same to an overnight motel clerk. I guess I wouldn't know, having never been a motel clerk. It's not my experience of any of my other working-with-people jobs, though.
And I was only halfway through. I would've been much happier with this part of the experience, I think, if doubt had crept in etc when I was closer to actually wrapping up the mystery. But instead I was faced with the prospect of 4-6 more hours of the NPCs slowly blending into each other and losing any semblance of a satisfying solution to the murder, or even any semblance of being able to convincingly frame my least favorite guest. This did not sound fun, even though I did have fun for my first two sessions. So I stopped playing there.
I don't know if my game experience (in this regard) was typical. I did a tiny bit of math to learn how likely repeat events are, but I did not sit down and calculate the actual expected length of the game. Maybe most people's No-Tell Motel games are shorter, and thus they don't run into this problem. Maybe I played unusually slowly, or am bad at shuffling, or just drew unusually few motive cards. I don't know. I did ask the designer if he knows how long an average game is, but this is con season, so I don't expect to find out any time soon. I'll update this if I do, though.
For once, I have no random gripes..
I fully understand why this is impractical to produce, but boy, it would be so cool to have a No-Tell Motel deck of cards. Drawing a regular card and consulting the book was perfectly fine, but it would be neat to actually shuffle a deck with all these NPCs' faces in it.
SPEAKING OF MERCH! LET ME TELL YOU! There is merch for this game. Normally, this is not something I care about at all, with TTRPGs. I do not buy dice trays. I do not buy dice themed after my favorite characters from actual plays. I do not buy maps or calendars or plushies or shirts. I don't even really buy physical books. Partially this is because I'm poor and live in a small apartment, but it's mostly because I'm just not that interested.
HOWEVER. For this game you can buy THESE things:
(Click through to see details. All images from the Bannerless Games webshop, where you too can exchange money for goods.)
Those are, respectively, a No-Tell Motel keychain (of the exact type the room keys go on at a specific type of motel), door hanger, and ashtray—sorry, "dice tray"—with branded matchbooks. These are so, so charming and delightful to me. This is, I think, the only TTRPG merch I've ever really coveted. Ken sent me all of these with my review copy, and I can confirm that they're just as delightful in real life. Holding that keychain takes me right back to all the mediocre motels I stayed in while driving cross-country, my whole life in my car, to move for grad school, and I am, for real, putting my keys on it. The dice tray is, genuinely, pleasant to roll in. Having all this stuff while playing the game? Very immersive. I love trinkets, and as previously mentioned I love motels, so these are perfect, to me. I think if I hadn't gotten them with my review copy I would have spent real money to buy them. Ken Lowery, you really hit a home run with these.
Also! The actual zine is beautiful. You saw the cover up top: delightfully pulpy. Inside, it's part motel employee handbook, part advertisement—the kind you'd see in, say, a phone book, or one of those little booklets of ads and coupons you pick up at highway rest stops. (Do they still make those?) There are also a couple pages with images of various fictional motel ephemera, like branded coasters, postcards, and telephone message slips. Shawn McGuan, who did the art, and Kelsea Zwerneman, who did the layout, deserve so much praise. It's all perfectly flavorful, and having a physical copy really made my sessions feel more immersive. I'm not normally a huge advocate for the superiority of physical copies, but I think the physical version really adds something special to the experience here.
Also! The designer has created a very atmospheric playlist to listen to while you play the game. It's great. Highly recommend putting it on with a motel ambience track in the background for max immersion.
I like a lot of things about this game, but listing them all would be impractical. Here's one last thing though: most of the NPCs, even those with portraits which would certainly be gendered on sight by cis people, are referred to exclusively with they/them pronouns. Neat!
Does this game deliver on its premise?
Mostly, I think, yeah. It fell down a little on the "murder mystery" bit for me, but knocked it out of the park on the "spying" and "gossip" bits.
I did. I am really, truly, very nosy, and this was very satisfying. No other game has ever satisfied my nosiness so thoroughly. I think if I'd tried to "finish" the game I wouldn't have kept having fun, so I'm glad I stopped when I did, but I did have a great time.
You know what? Surprisingly, I would. It was a really unique experience, and I think a second playthrough would be different enough to also be fun. Next time I'm in the mood for maximum gossip, I think I will come back to this. Maybe I'll even make it to the epilogue next time!
I certainly would. If you like gossip, rumors, and theorizing about strangers, I think you should play this game. If you're a random table hater like me, I had a good time, even with the tables! Just be aware you might not conclude the mystery itself before you run out of random-table patience. If you don't hate random tables and the kind of gameplay they produce, or you're less attached to feeling like you could definitively "solve" the mystery, great news. I think you probably would make it to the epilogue and have fun the whole way.
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Disclaimers: I got a free review copy of this game (and its various associated bits and bobs) from the designer.
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