There's no shortage of World War 2 biographies and movies about the brutal reality and shocking bravery of leadership in combat. For whatever reason, though, I've never experienced a campaign wargame that sought to capture not just the tactical but the interpersonal life of soldiers and officers who fought alongside each other for years at a time. That's the goal of Burden of Command , an upcoming game which bills itself as a "World War 2 tactical leadership RPG" but uses game rules that will be pretty familiar to a lot of players of classic hex-and-counter wargames.
I got access to a few training missions and two short scenarios in a pre-release build of Burden of Command, and found an interesting hybrid of wargame relationship-management RPG. Burden of Command starts before the characters go to war, in training missions where your soldiers aren't even using live ammunition—they're carrying around metal pipes and wooden logs to sub in for their heavy weapons like machine guns and mortars. The story isn't just about the battles, but about the people in them.
This is very much on purpose. Burden of Command clearly aspires to a kind of true-to-life realism inspired by shows like Band of Brothers and drawn from the stories told by veterans. It's a kind of realism that leans on using subtly-altered photography and in-spirit events from the time period.
To that end your training missions are mimed as real-world training exercises using the characters who'll go to war together. T.