How This All Started
Out of Command Points started, as many expensive family hobbies probably do, with a 10-year-old who would not take no for an answer. Marshall discovered Warhammer 40k first and then more or less forced Ben into playing with him—despite Ben’s initial resistance and the added indignity of Marshall beating him in every single game they played. Caroline held the line longer. She agreed to paint Marshall’s Tyranids and reluctantly accept the growing population of expensive little plastic murder-men in the house, but she was very clear: she was never going to actually play Warhammer.
That lasted until a family vacation, when Marshall’s relentless Warhammer yammering finally broke her. Caroline agreed to get an army of her own largely as a negotiating tactic: if she joined the hobby, perhaps Marshall would stop talking about it for five consecutive minutes (in retrospect, that logic was not particularly sound). Instead, all three of them got sucked in. Somewhere in that progression—from Marshall evangelizing, to Ben repeatedly losing, to Caroline accidentally becoming a person with strong opinions about ancient Egyptian space skeletons—we realized that the story of a normal family falling into the grim darkness of the 41st millennium was at least as entertaining as the game itself. And that’s how Out of Command Points began.