Lemonopoly

Lemonopoly was a real-world, place-based game about lemons. Players joined a city team, went out into the Bay Area to find a lemon tree or a “Lemon Challenge,” did the challenge (picked some, made something, shared some), photographed it, and logged it back on the site as a Claim. Points rolled up per city. Whichever city had the most Claims by the end of the season became “The Big Lemon.”

Half competitive game, half public-food-systems intervention — a lightweight way to get people out to their neighborhood lemon trees and talking about what a resilient local food economy might actually look like when it starts with something as small as a shared backyard tree.

Winner of the Zero1 Arts Grant. The original lemonopoly.org domain has since been squatted; the link on this page points to a 2013 Wayback snapshot of the real thing.