Accounting for Empires: Becker's CPA game for CPA Exam Review students

Becker has put national pass rates for the Uniform CPA Examination at about 50 percent and describes the exam as one of the hardest professional credentialing tests, with four sections to pass on the way to a license. The game was designed as an extra way to study between lessons.

Becker Professional Education built Accounting for Empires as a supplementary study tool for candidates in its CPA Exam Review course. The game won a bronze medal in the Corporate and Vocational Skills category of the 2020 International Serious Play Awards.

The CPA game uses multiple-choice questions and task-based simulations, with four answer choices per multiple-choice question, as on the exam. Players answer increasingly difficult accounting questions to earn the points that pay for buildings, and construction gets faster and more efficient as they progress. The game is long: nearly 140 hours of gameplay lead up to the candidate's own moment of passing the exam.

A player starts by building a university, a bank and a library with the starting funds. The library unlocks topics for discussion, such as individual taxation, and a topic opens into categories such as filing status and exemptions.

As on the exam, each question has four answers and the player picks one. A round has a time limit of three minutes.

A multiplayer mode lets players form alliances, run espionage or challenge other players to increase their resources. Becker says the game interaction gives candidates a sense of connection with other students and helps with engagement, confidence, pass rates and satisfaction. Those outcomes are Becker's claims, and no results are cited.

Becker Professional Education belongs to Adtalem Global Education, a workforce solutions provider headquartered in the United States and listed on the NYSE as ATGE. Besides CPA Exam Review, Becker offers CMA Exam Review and continuing professional education, says it has helped more than one million candidates prepare for the CPA Exam, and is accredited by the Accrediting Council for Continuing Education & Training.

In 2020 the game was available for download from Apple's App Store and Google Play to members enrolled in Becker's CPA Exam Review program, which made it a members-only extra.

Becker's CPA Exam Review page and its Advantage course page load in November 2026, and neither mentions Accounting for Empires. No Becker page confirming that the game is offered today could be read, so its status is listed as unconfirmed.

Candidates who want a CPA game or a gamified study tool should check the current course description before buying a course for that reason.