Overview

We turned accounting into a game. Kaikei is an accounting puzzle game that lets you experience the flow of money through a company in your spare moments.

How to play: just choose and place the transactions that fall from the top. Place them correctly and an "accounting map" — the balance sheet and income statement combined into a single picture — grows on screen. Along the way you'll close the books, and sometimes even go bankrupt.

Accounting and bookkeeping can feel intimidating; numbers make many people tense up. Kaikei is built especially for those people. Not memorization — as you play, the flow of a company's money quietly settles into your body. That's the experience we set out to create.

Play Kaikei — an accounting puzzle game (beta, free)

Why we built it

In 2021 we wrote a book called The Map of Accounting, which laid out the flow of money through a company in more than 100 diagrams. Even then, we felt that some of what makes accounting fascinating is hard to capture in a still image.

Accounting isn't static — it moves. You sell something. You borrow money. You pay salaries. You buy equipment. Each transaction gradually reshapes the company. We'd long wanted something that let you feel that movement.

So we built Kaikei. Place a falling transaction and the shape of the company changes in real time. We translated accounting from something you "read" into something you "move."

Features

  • Just place the falling transactions — simple rules: put money's uses (debit) and sources (credit) in the right place
  • Watch the "accounting map" grow — place them correctly and the combined balance-sheet-and-income-statement picture grows on screen
  • Closings and bankruptcies — close the books partway through, or fail and go bankrupt; feel the ups and downs of running a company
  • It sinks in as you play — not memorization; the sense of money flow builds naturally through play
  • Completely free (beta) — start right away with a Google account; more industry scenarios are on the way

Built solo, with AI

Kaikei was built solo, little by little, with generative AI. The thinking we developed in The Map of Accounting — distilling complex money flows into visual structures — has now been brought into an interactive game.

Some features and content are still to come, but it's free to play now as a beta. Please try it and tell us what's confusing or what could be better. We'd love to grow it together.

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