Plumbers have Mario, doctors have Theme Hospital, and psychopaths have The Sims. But where are the games for accountants?
You might think a game that feels like work wouldn’t be a fun way to spend your time, but you’d be embarrassingly wrong. Working out the profit margins for different crops in Stardew Valley is one of life’s underrated pleasures. You might pause and wonder why you've dedicated so much time to what amounts to another job, but what else would you be doing? Curing cancer?
To be clear, the Briefcase knows of no game where you play an actual accountant. We scoured far and wide and contacted many, many media historians, and found nothing. Let us know if you find one, but you surely won’t.
That said, there are definitely games that capture that intoxicating essence of accounting – that blend of strategy, resource management, optimisation that we all constantly strive to deliver. Why wouldn’t you want to try a game like that?
💼 Capitalism Lab
Perhaps the closest thing to actual accounting, Capitalism Lab is a deeply detailed business simulator. You play as a CEO, managing everything from what land to buy to which industries to invest in. You control supply chains, adjust pricing strategies, and see how your decisions affect a dynamic in-game economy.
It’s the only game that gives you the joy of vertical integration and the panic of cashflow crunches. It may also be the only time you enjoy pretending to be your boss, other than when you sit in their chair when they’re working from home.
🏭 Victoria 3
It’s every accountant’s dream to have been there when modern accounting was born. Sadly, Victoria 3 is the closest you can get to it. But luckily, it’s also very good. You lead a nation through industrialisation from 1836 to 1936, making decisions on technologies, trade, labour policy, and resource management. It kind of does boil down to a spreadsheet if you think about it a lot – we advise that you don’t!
If Capitalism Lab lets you play the boss, Victoria 3 lets you play the boss’s boss’s boss – with full power to destroy entire economies. The key is to not destroy your own.
🚀 Eve Online
At first glance, Eve Online looks like your run-of-the-mill space adventure with lasers and aliens. However, under the surface lies one of the most complex player-driven economies in gaming history. Every ship, station, and item is mined, manufactured, and sold by players.
It’s so realistic that economists have studied it. The in-game currency (ISK) has real-world value, and Eve even had its own banking scandal – the CEO of a player-run bank known as EBank withdrew 200 billion ISK (≈ A$6,100) to make a real-life house deposit. 2008 eat your heart out!
Many players spend years managing corporations without ever engaging with the actual game – instead opting to take it offline, working with the bare numbers. It even has an Excel-plugin so you can export live data from the game into your spreadsheet. Now we think of it, this one might be too close to the job.
⚽ Football Manager
This is the classic spreadsheet game. Yes, there’s football in it, but that’s not why people play. The match engine is famously outdated, with blocky little lads accelerating at breakneck speed down the wing, but nobody cares because the real game is in that sweet, sweet data. It’s about scouting, budget balancing, and tactical tweaks – obsessively optimising your squad, basically.
There are a lot of players out there that don't even like football that much – they just like running a highly detailed virtual organisation. If you’ve ever taken Accrington Stanley to a Champions League final, you’ve probably earned some CPD hours. That said, we advise that you check with your regulatory body first.
🏙 Cities: Skylines
Have you ever dreamed of being a bureaucrat? Well, Cities: Skylines lets you adjust tax rates, manage public service budgets, and tinker with funding allocations. But the focus is on ensuring everyone gets to work on time.
You start by placing roads but, by the end, you’re working out whether healthcare should get a 3% budget cut to fund landfill upgrades. If you've ever wanted more sewage treatment reports in your life, it’s your lucky day!
🔧 Factorio
This is a game for those who look at a workflow and think "I could shave 0.2 seconds off that process."
In Factorio, you build and optimise sprawling automated factories, managing resource inputs and machine outputs. It’s all about constant business improvement. But it’s also on an alien planet, which is fun.
You may think having to redesign entire supply chains because you didn’t plan 40 hours ahead sounds tedious, but Factorio is consistently one of the highest-rated games of all time on Steam, and it’s just not worth arguing with those people.
🧠 Final thoughts
It might seem odd to recommend a load of games that are like your job to an accountant. But also, what else are we meant to do? We don’t know what else you’re interested in. I guess if you like tennis, you should check out some tennis games. There are lots of those.
We’ll come back with a new list next year, after some bright spark develops IFRS Challenge 2027.
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