BURDEN OF COMMAND

A WWI Trench Management Tycoon

It is 1917. You are Captain Alistair Thorne of the 11th East Lancashire Regiment. You have four squads of exhausted men, dwindling supplies, and orders from a Brigade HQ twelve miles behind the line that has not visited the front in three months.

Hold the line for six weeks.

That is all that is asked. It is not a small ask.

What Is This Game?

Burden of Command is a terminal-based strategy game about resource management, personal leadership, and the quiet attrition of keeping men alive in an industrialised war.

It runs entirely in your terminal. No graphics. No sound. Just text, colour, and the weight of decisions.

You manage four squads across 84 turns — six weeks of half-days on the Western Front. You ration food. You stretch ammunition. You treat the wounded. You decide which squad goes over the wire tonight and which one gets to rest. You read the dispatches from HQ and decide whether to comply or protect your men. You watch the morale bars and the weather and the enemy aggression creep upward and you make the best of bad options, every single turn.

The game does not ask you to win battles. It asks you to endure.

Features

Deep resource management Track four interdependent resources — food, ammunition, medical supplies, and tools — each with its own consumption curves, critical thresholds, and crisis events. Set your ration policy from Full to Emergency. Choose how freely to spend ammunition. Barter between resource types at the unfavourable rates that frontline supply chains deserve. Watch 10-turn sparkline trends to spot problems before they become catastrophes.

Seven squad orders Send squads to standby, patrol, raid, repair, rest, forage, or scavenge. Each order changes fatigue, morale, and resource consumption in different ways. Pair them with your sergeant's personality and your current ammo policy for results that compound over time — for better and for worse.

Named men who can die Each squad contains notable soldiers with individual traits: a sharpshooter who might spot the sniper before he fires, a cook who saves a ration every day, a medic who tends wounds through the night, a musician who keeps the men's spirits from collapsing entirely. They have names. They appear in the Field Diary when they are killed.

HQ Dispatches Five scripted orders from Brigade arrive at critical moments in the campaign. Each demands a binary choice — comply or defy — with distinct mechanical and narrative consequences. Your history of compliance affects your HQ reputation, which in turn affects the quality of supply convoys. There are no clean answers.

Trench engineering Spend tools to permanently improve your sector with twelve available upgrades: duckboards against the mud, sandbag revetments against the shells, a field hospital for the wounded, a Lewis gun nest for the raids. Build what you can afford. Prioritise carefully.

Command Actions You have up to four command points per day — the finite reserve of personal authority available to a company commander. Issue the rum ration. Write letters for the men who can't. Hold a medal ceremony. Request supplies from HQ. Every action costs something.

18 random events Artillery, gas attacks, enemy raids, snipers, rats in the ration stores, letters from home, friendly fire, fraternisation across no-man's-land, food spoilage in the heat, ammunition dampened by rain, a young chaplain who arrived yesterday and doesn't know where to look. Events scale with difficulty, aggression level, and weather.

Four difficulty levels From Green Fields (forgiving, recommended for newcomers) to God Help Us — ironman mode, no loading, no second chances. This is historically accurate.

A living Field Diary Every significant event in your campaign is timestamped and recorded in a scrollable field diary. Read it at the end. Consider what the numbers meant.

15 Codex entries Detailed lore on the Western Front, trench warfare, gas weapons, the enemy, medical care, weapons, daily life, and the individual histories of your four sergeants. Not required reading. Worth reading.

The Men

Sgt. Thomas Harris — Alpha Section. Former coal miner from Wigan. Brave to the point of recklessness. His hands tremble slightly at breakfast. He pours his tea very carefully. He does not mention the trembling. Neither do the men.

Sgt. William Moore — Bravo Section. Regular Army since 1897. Steadfast. The most experienced soldier in the company. He respects Captain Thorne. This is rare and means a great deal.

Sgt. Owen Lewis — Charlie Section. Former schoolteacher from Cardiff. A drunkard. He was a fine soldier and a finer man once. He hides bottles inside the sandbag walls. On good mornings he recites Keats to the section. The men listen.

Sgt. Arthur Bell — Delta Section. Former bank clerk from Lambeth. Conscripted. Cowardly. He is not a villain. He is a man violently miscast by history. He keeps a tin of unsent letters under his bedroll. He would have been good at his former job. He was very good at his former job.

Technical

• Single Common Lisp source file, ~1,800 lines — the entire game in one file
• Cross-platform: Linux, macOS, and Windows 10+
• Requires SBCL (Steel Bank Common Lisp), available free at sbcl.org
• Run directly: sbcl --script boc.lisp
• Linux/macOS: ./build.sh — produces ./boc
• Windows: build.bat — produces boc.exe
• No external libraries, no dependencies beyond SBCL itself
• Three save slots with versioned binary saves

Github: https://github.com/RootOfCode/Burden-of-Command

A Note on the History

The 11th East Lancashire Regiment and Captain Thorne are fictional. The conditions they experience are not.

The Third Battle of Ypres — Passchendaele — ran from July to November 1917. Approximately 325,000 Allied soldiers became casualties for territorial gains measured in a few miles of Belgian mud. The average life expectancy of a British second lieutenant at the front was six weeks.

The men who served in the trenches of the Western Front were ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances. They endured. Many did not return.

This game is a small act of memory.

Burden of Command is a free, open-source game released under the MIT license.