Okay, that title is a wholly unfair joke. I use Microsoft Excel in my line of work on a startlingly regular basis, and it’s actually a valuable tool for much of the analysis I have to do. That said, it’s arguably the most anachronistic member of the Office family, and its usage has (seemingly) evolved the least over successive iterations. It has quirks and frustrating aspects. And it isn’t exactly exciting: it’s a spreadsheet application, good for doing charts, bulk mathematical operations, and a handful of other things.

Oooh. Aaah.

At any rate, accountant Cary Walkin no doubt uses Excel a lot in his daytime career. But he also decided to have some fun with it, and in the process crafted an RPG (which he calls Arena), that boasts a surprising number of features:

• Random enemies: Over 2000 possible enemies with different AI abilities.
• Random items: 39 item modifiers result in over 1000 possible item combinations and attributes.
• An interesting story with 4 different endings depending on how the player has played the game.
• 8 boss encounters, each with their own tactics.
• 4 pre-programmed arenas followed by procedurally generated arenas. Each play-through has its own challenges.
• 31 Spells. There are many different strategies for success.
• 15 Unique items. Unique items have special properties and can only drop from specific enemies.
• 36 Achievements.

This all, again, in Microsoft Excel.

You can download the game from Cary’s website, and it should work on Excel 2007 (or better) for Windows.