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║  B U R D E N   O F   C O M M A N D            ║
║     A  W W I  T r e n c h  T y c o o n        ║
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  11th East Lancashire Regt.  │  Passchendaele  │  1917

"The men fight less for king and country than for the man beside them."

Burden of Command is a single-file terminal strategy game written in Common Lisp. You play Captain Alistair Thorne of the 11th East Lancashire Regiment on the Western Front in 1917. Your objective is simple: keep your company alive and functional for six weeks while Brigade Headquarters demands the impossible from twelve miles behind the line.

The game runs entirely in a standard 80×24 ANSI terminal. No graphics, no sound, no dependencies beyond SBCL.

sbcl --script boc.lisp

./build.sh        # produces ./boc
./launch.sh       # open in a new terminal window

build.bat         :: produces boc.exe
launch.bat        :: run the game

All platforms: terminal minimum 80 columns × 24 rows, UTF-8 character encoding.

Windows-specific notes:

• Requires Windows 10 version 1511 or later for VT100/ANSI escape support (ENABLE_VIRTUAL_TERMINAL_PROCESSING). Earlier versions will display garbled escape sequences.
• Use Windows Terminal, PowerShell, or a modern cmd.exe. Legacy cmd.exe on older Windows does not support ANSI colours.
• The game sets the console to UTF-8 (CP 65001) automatically on startup. If box-drawing characters still look wrong, set your terminal font to a Unicode-capable typeface: Cascadia Mono, Consolas, or DejaVu Sans Mono all work well.
• Save files are written to the current working directory.

Linux / macOS notes:

• Check your terminal size: echo $COLUMNS x $LINES
• Check your locale: locale | grep LANG

It is the summer of 1917. The Third Battle of Ypres — Passchendaele — is underway. Your four-squad company holds a sector of the front-line trench near Flanders, Belgium. You have received orders to hold the line for six weeks.

You have food, ammunition, medical supplies, and tools. You have four squads of exhausted men, each led by a sergeant with his own personality and history. You have three command points a day to spend on personal leadership. You have a deteriorating relationship with a Brigade HQ that has not visited the front in three months.

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

You command four sections:

Each sergeant's personality modifies the effectiveness of all fatigue and morale changes:

Assign one order to each squad each turn. Orders persist until changed.

Key interactions:

• Squads above 80% fatigue lose 4 morale/turn regardless of order
• PATROL bonus is multiplied by the current Ammo Policy
• FORAGE and SCAVENGE have low raid resistance — watch sector threats
• Squads at critical morale (< 10%) may desert one man per turn

Four resources balanced across 84 turns (6 weeks × 7 days × 2 half-days):

Set in Resources → Policies. Applies a food multiplier and morale effect every turn.

Resources → Barter lets you trade resources at unfavourable rates (e.g. 20 food → 8 ammo). Twelve trade pairs cover all four resource combinations. Barter is a last resort — rates reflect the chaos of frontline supply chains.

The header shows current CP (●●●). Maximum 3/day, or 4 with Signal Wire. One CP regenerates each AM turn.

Spend via Command Actions (C):

The Rum Store upgrade makes Rum Ration cost 0 CP (food cost remains).

Artillery, raids, gas, snipers, and friendly fire produce walking wounded in addition to kills. Displayed as +2W per squad in the main view.

• Wounds passively consume 1 med per wound per turn
• Untreated wounds (meds = 0) have a 15% chance/turn of killing the man
• Use Treat Wounded command action or build the Field Hospital upgrade

Accessed via Pause → Trench Upgrades. Spend tools to permanently improve the sector.

Each squad has two named privates with a special trait. They contribute passive effects every turn and can be killed by hostile events.

Deaths are recorded in the Field Diary by full name.

Four sectors A–D each with a 0–100 threat level shown in the map panel and Intel screen.

• Rises with aggression and Sector Assault random events
• Falls when the corresponding squad is on PATROL or RAID
• High threat increases likelihood of raids and artillery in that sector
• Observation Post improves awareness

Shown as Rep:N in the header (0–100). Affects convoy quality and Supply Request outcomes. Modified by how you respond to HQ Dispatches.

Five scripted orders interrupt the game with a full-screen choice modal.

Artillery · Enemy Raid · Gas Attack · Mail from Home · Rats · Influenza · Sergeant Breakdown · Supply Convoy · Reinforcements · Sniper · Fraternisation · Hero Moment · Friendly Fire · Enemy Cache · Food Spoilage · Ammo Damp · Wound Heals · Sector Assault

All events scale with difficulty, aggression, and weather.

Duckboards halve fatigue in rain and storm.

God Help Us is ironman mode — no loading mid-campaign.

Score = (Turns × 5) + (Men × 20) + (Morale × 3) + (Medals × 50)
      + (Rep/10 × 30) + (Upgrades × 25)
      + 500 (victory)  −  200 (mutiny)
      × Difficulty multiplier

Three save slots stored as binary files in the working directory:

boc_s0.bin   boc_s1.bin   boc_s2.bin

Each slot shows date, week, men alive, and difficulty at save time. Saves are versioned — files from earlier versions are not compatible.

Access via Main menu → Load Game or ESC → Pause → Save / Load.

Ironman (God Help Us) mode disables loading.

boc.lisp         — entire game source (~1,800 lines, Common Lisp)
build.sh         — Linux/macOS build script (produces ./boc)
build.bat        — Windows build script (produces boc.exe)
launch.sh        — Linux/macOS launcher (opens in terminal emulator)
launch.bat       — Windows launcher
README.md        — this file

The game is written in a deliberately data-driven style. All behaviour is defined in flat tables near the top of the source. To change how a task works, edit +task-defs+. To add a difficulty level, add a row to +diff-defs+. To add a random event, extend +rand-probs+ and add a case to random-events. No behaviour is hardcoded into logic that belongs in data.

The single-file structure is intentional. The entire game runs with one command on Linux, macOS, and Windows. The build scripts provide convenience binaries but are not required to play the game.

The 11th East Lancashire Regiment, Captain Alistair Thorne, and the individual soldiers depicted are fictional. The conditions, equipment, events, and institutional failures they experience are not.

The Third Battle of Ypres (Passchendaele) ran from July to November 1917 and resulted in approximately 325,000 Allied casualties for territorial gains measured in a few miles of Belgian mud. The average life expectancy of a British second lieutenant on the Western Front in 1917 was approximately six weeks.

The men who served in the trenches were ordinary people placed in extraordinary circumstances. They endured. Many did not return. None should be forgotten.

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2025

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.