The Practice: a new game puts accounting graduates on the clock
A new browser game turns the first year of an accounting career into something you can play. It's in beta now, and free while we test.
Hamilton, November 2026. A new browser game, The Practice, turns the first year of an accounting career into something you can play. It's aimed at accounting students, new graduates and the practices that train them, and it's in beta testing now.
Players start in their last semester at the University of Waikato. They code a student society's bank feed, check a classmate's pizza claim and sit a final exam. The mark decides which of three Hamilton practices offers them a job: the gentle Cooke Books, the steady Kitty & Co., or the relentless Burnham & Out, where the pay is better and the clock is shorter.
From there it's a working year. Jobs land in an inbox all week:
- bank coding, receipts and reconciliations
- expense claims, checked with a red pen and three stamps
- client calls that ring mid-task
- deadlines in IRD's calendar
Each month ends with a real piece of month-end work and a review with the boss. The year closes with an IRD visit, an auditor, and Close the Year. Every mistake comes with the right answer and the reason, so players learn by doing rather than by reading.
The game is unapologetically Kiwi, and a little cheeky. Clients include a drainlayer called Laying Pipe Ltd, a laundromat called Lord of the Rinse and a fried chicken shop in Frankton. Some of them will try to pull the wool over your eyes. A bulldog clip named Bully explains how everything works. Players can choose a full year or a shorter game, and pick up on any device.
[Quote from Adam on why he built it, and what he hopes students and practices get from it.]
— Adam, creator of The Practice
The Practice was designed and built in conversation with Claude Code, Anthropic's AI coding agent. Adam set the vision, the tone and the accounting standards, and tested each round on a laptop and a phone. The agent wrote the code, the content and hundreds of automated tests, played the game in a browser, and used separate AI reviewers to check it on phones and tablets.
By the numbers
| What | Count |
|---|---|
| Work weeks (4 at uni, 25 in Year 1) | 29 |
| Jobs in the inbox | 211 |
| Expense claims to check | 123 |
| Kinds of job | 10 |
| Life events | 31 |
| Practices to join | 3 |
Where it's at
The Practice is in beta: Year 1 is complete and playable, and it's free while we test. Request to play, or leave your details to hear when it launches. Year 2 (CA study and a parody share market) and Year 3 (running your own practice) are in development.
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