Who’d have thought Medusa Games Oranges and Lemons would be even sweeter than the nursery rhyme

Oranges and Lemons is a game that invites players to walk through London’s past — and it’s brisk, bustling, and full of character.

Designed by Richard Denning and published by Medusa Games, Oranges and Lemons is a medium-weight strategy game that blends worker placement, area control and historical flavor into a tight, competitive package with a point-salad scoring mechanism. The Oranges and Lemons title comes from the famous nursery rhyme, and the game leans into that theme with gusto, turning the bells of London’s churches into a clever framework for movement, scoring, and interaction.

Set in the 17th century, players take on the role of bell founders, racing to deliver bells to churches across the city. Each church corresponds to a line from the rhyme — St. Clement’s, St. Martin’s, Old Bailey, and so on — and each offers its own placement spaces and corresponding rewards. The map is a stylized representation of London, with a central cathedral square that houses a clever turn order structure, and the different churches arranged as a fan across each corner. You’ll need to plan moves carefully, because pieces that activate earlier in the predetermined order will return back to the centre first, meaning that they will activate earlier in the next round.

The core mechanics largely involve worker placement with a chunk of resource exchange. Each of the churches houses four placement spaces, making sixteen in total. Players can take actions as simple as just taking one or more oranges, pancakes or bricks, or as complex as expanding the warehouse on their player board, or investing in bells or shipping. I say complex, but Oranges and Lemons never really is — the turns are simple, even as the internal mathematics and decisions do carry plenty of weight.

Even though workers are placed in the order set by the central cathedral track, the actions on the spaces are not resolved until all workers are placed. So the flow of Oranges and Lemons is to place workers in one order, but then to resolve them from the lowest numbered space through to the highest. As worker placement spots resolve, workers then return to the turn order board in the next available space.

There are a few spaces that really give you pause for thought in Oranges and Lemons. Loans, for example, allow the player to spend money (initially five, then ten or fifteen) to issue a loan (not take one.) It’s a definite downside to spend that much money, but doing so is worth both points at the end of the game and recurring income each round. Bells (also expensive) offer an even more interesting choice — place a bell on any of the fourteen worker placement spaces and you’ll get a bonus at various times. This is often during the cleanup phase, but sometimes bonuses will occur whenever you take an action, for example by allowing you to take the action with a discount.

In addition to these spaces, Oranges and Lemons also has a few elements printed on the side. There are docked ships (which act as the timer), East India Company contracts, and then a couple of tracks. These are relatively simple to work with and in most cases link directly to one single worker placement area. As an example, the St Katherine’s church space (where players can sell goods) links to a track along the bottom of the board that iterates one step at a time, unlocking end game scoring bonuses when players pass certain gates. 

There’s also a stock track on the right hand side of the board that links to the East India Company. Again, this is relatively simple (certainly in comparison to actual stock manipulation games) and basically means that players can buy or sell shares in the EIC at the current rate, and that the market itself will be manipulated by factors shown on the EIC contract/ship cards that will be drawn each round. Again, if you were wondering why you want EIC shares, then the answer is “because they give you end game points of course!”

When you take the clever turn order track, the simple worker placement/action programming idea and then the relatively simple flourishes that sit around the edge —  the bells and tracks etc — then what you get in Oranges and Lemons is a surprisingly clever and highly synergistic eurogame. The early game is quite focussed on “doing things” such as getting money resources, placing bells on spaces you think will be popular and perhaps taking loans.

Later in the game, turn order (which is already important) becomes massive, and as with many games in the worker placement genre, players who didn’t invest in their extra workers earlier will start to feel that they are really missing out. Ship cards will be getting flipped for huge rewards, leading to big moves on the stock market. In the first few games, it’s hard to see exactly how you’re going to score (as it seems a bit of everything will do) but as players get more experienced, they’ll learn to focus on a few things and less on others.

Another thing that sets Oranges and Lemons apart is its thematic integration. The rhyme isn’t just window dressing — it’s woven into the scoring, the objectives, and the pacing in a really creative way. If there’s one thing I always tell people I love about board games, it’s that unlike anything else I can name, they so often pick up a niche or unusual subject (like a nursery rhyme) and lean into it with clever mechanics and features. Oranges and Lemons is a top drawer example of that.

Visually, Oranges and Lemons is charming. The board is clean and legible, with period-appropriate artwork that evokes the setting without sacrificing clarity. The components are solid, and the iconography is intuitive once you’ve played a round or two. It’s a game that respects its players, offering strategic depth in a format that’s easy to teach and quick to play.

In my experience, Oranges and Lemons shines with three or four players, where competition for votes, ship contracts and bell placement becomes more intense. The two-player mode is completely functional and each location has reduced placement spaces, but the game’s interaction really comes alive with a full-ish table. That said, Oranges and Lemons is a rareish eurogame of this weight in that it supports five players straight out of the box, but I’m yet to try that. 

If there is one thing that I felt was less successful in Oranges and Lemons, it was perhaps the actual act of scoring, and perhaps to a lesser extent some of the values. Scoring is a bit of a nightmare – the inclusive scorepad helps, but there’s just so much to count here and a few areas that will need clarification in your first few games (for example the scoring bonuses that are embedded within the EIC stock track). I was also occasionally pipped to the post by someone who had scored a lot of points from votes, which are drawn somewhat blindly, when I felt I’d invested in good (and visible) plans from the start of the game. These issues aren’t massive, and are far from the worst I’ve seen in similar games. I am just nitpicking really – because the truth is that I really like Oranges and Lemons and there’s very little I dislike about it.

Oranges and Lemons is a clever, thoughtful, thematic strategy game that turns a nursery rhyme into a competitive race through historical London that is definitely not for young children. It’s not an overly flashy game, but the more time I spent with it, the more clever I found it — offering more than enough crunch to satisfy seasoned gamers, while remaining accessible to newcomers thanks to a pleasant aesthetic and relatively simple structure. If you enjoy route-building with a twist, and you appreciate games that wear their theme with pride, this one’s worth ringing.

Oranges and Lemons is available now from Zatu Games.