The game Lemontopoly has been mispronounced many times.
“People have called it ‘lemon’ a lot,” said Nathan Tilly, who graduated from Lemont High School in the spring.
But it was far from a lemon.
Ten years ago, Lemontopoly won the Chicagoland Junior Achievement Company of the Year award and this year, a revamped 10th-anniversary edition of the game was created by the Lemont Junior Achievement club and came up a big winner again.
Tilly and teammates Andrew Kiel, Lydia Pelen, Natalia Zagata, Jovana Maksimovich and Milena Maksimovich earned Company of the Year honors at an event held at DePaul University toward the end of the school year. Tilly, Kiel and Pelen earned top honors in their respective team-leader categories.
So, what is Lemontopoly?
It’s a board game that is similar to Monopoly except that it is heavily themed toward the Lemont community.
The 10th anniversary of the game coincided with Lemont’s 150th birthday.
“We start a business from the ground up,” faculty advisor John Aspel said. “We come up with a new product every single year. Our students come up with ideas and we narrow it down to about five ideas.
“We do marketing research and go out into the community and find out which of the five people likely will purchase, and the community wanted Lemontopoly.”
The community gobbled up 500 of the board games at $20 apiece and $2,500 of the profits went to Lemont’s Hope and Friendship Foundation while $2,500 went to the EllieStrong Forever Foundation. The rest of the money became $125 dividends returned to stockholders who invested in the project.
Lemont High School has a near-monopoly on winning the Company of the Year, winning 10 of the last 16 competitions.
Tilly was this year’s team leader and said things were busy, but ran smoothly.
“Coming into it, we knew it was going to be a lot of work because we were making a whole board game from scratch,” he said. “Obviously we had to deal with copyright and all of that fun stuff.
“But some of the aspects of it – especially the fame and fortune cards – we made were fun.”
Tilly said the cards featured local angles such as getting out of court free after eating a Nick burger at Nick’s Tavern in under a minute, or collecting $200 for eating a hot dog at Taste of Lemont.
The project started at the beginning of the school year and the crew faced several deadlines along the way, but Tilly said he was happy with the process.
“Everything went well,” he said. “Everything got done on time. It was honestly pretty smooth. We met all of our deadlines.”
He called the $20 price tag for the product “a steal” and 500 patrons also felt that way.
Lemont is a community proud of its history and Aspel said that many Junior Achievement projects over the years have zeroed in on that.
“We try to come up with products that bring people together,” he said. “We have done puzzles, pledge cards with symbols of Lemont and the community itself. We’ve had a trivia game with facts about Lemont and the high school.
“People tend to move to Lemont and they don’t leave very often.”
However, some of the key team members of this year’s Company of the Year will be leaving for college soon.
Tilly plans on majoring in finance at Alabama. He already received the good news that he received a student ticket for a few of the Crimson Tide’s football games including the heated rivalry game against Auburn.
“I’m not even at Alabama and I already don’t like Auburn,” Tilly said.
Zataga is heading to Purdue, Pelan will go to Iowa State and Kiel will attend Tennessee.
Tilly is not sure if his career path will lead him into becoming a big boss or project manager in real life as it did in high school. But he now knows some of the ins and outs of running a company, and he said that was valuable.
He was with the Junior Achievement group all four years in high school and said he will miss his teammates.
“The best friendships you make are when you go through adversity together,” he said. “Getting to do this experience and sharing it with them really makes you a lot closer.”
Jeff Vorva is a freelance reporter for the Daily Southtown.
