Every chapter below lists what a student will be able to do by the end of it, and every single game inside it. All of them are finished and ready to play.
Two things worth knowing. The games use the perpetual inventory method — the one almost every university teaches. The periodic method appears only where it helps you see the difference. And accounting theory has its own games inside chapter 2: work through them if your course covers theory, and skip them if it does not.
The fifteen chapters run as a full first-year accounting course, or split into two semesters. Nothing changes but where you draw the line. Each outline below lists every learning objective and every game that teaches it, on one page you can print or save as a PDF.
This is the order you would teach them in. Open any chapter to see every game inside it.
Meet accounting: who uses it, the accounting equation, and the four reports every business prepares.
This is the chapter every student opens first, so it got the most careful review of all.
How a business writes down what it does: debits and credits, journals, ledgers, and the trial balance that checks the work.
Includes the optional Accounting Theory module — 8 extra games you can use or leave out.
Fixing the books at the end of the period so income and expenses land in the month they belong to.
Closing the books at the end of the year and turning the numbers into finished financial statements.
How a shop records buying goods, selling them, and reporting the profit it makes on those sales.
Which goods really belong to the business, what they cost, and how that cost becomes cost of goods sold.
How a business protects its cash: control rules, checking the bank statement, and running a small cash fund.
Money that customers owe the business: recording it, estimating what will never be paid, and earning interest.
Buildings, machines, and patents: what they cost, how that cost is spread over the years, and how they are sold.
What a company owes and must pay within one year: short-term loans, sales tax, repair promises and staff pay.
How companies borrow for many years: bonds, long-term loans, interest that changes over time, and paying debt off early.
How a corporation raises money by selling shares, shares profits with its owners, and reports what those owners own.
Where a company's cash really came from and where it went during the year, sorted into three clear groups.
Reading a company's finished financial statements and judging how strong, how profitable and how safe the business really is.
How a factory turns materials into products, what each product really costs, and how managers use costs to plan profit and cash.
American rules, American terminology. If you teach somewhere else, read this before you decide — it probably matters less than you think.
At introductory level, almost all of the accounting is the same wherever in the world you teach it. A debit is a debit. The two things that genuinely differ are the words — receivables or debtors, inventory or stock, income statement or profit and loss — and how adjustments are presented. Underneath, the double entry is identical.
So these games use American terminology throughout, and where IFRS takes a different line on something we teach, the game says so on the spot rather than pretending the difference is not there.
The material is written to match the introductory texts most widely used on courses like yours.
Teaching to a different standard? Tell us which one. It helps us decide what to build next, and we will write back.
david@accountingarcade.orgWant to see more, use these with your own students, or tell us something is wrong? Write to us.