This was a fabulous computer game. M.U.L.E. stood for, I believe, Multiple Use Land Element, meaning one MULE was good for establishing your land for mining, energy, or farming.
Depending on the land type, river, plain, or mountain, certain MULEs would do better than others depending on what you were trying to make. For example, it was difficult to grow food in the mountains, hard to mine in the river.
The colony was built on the planet "Irata" which is Atari spelled backwards.
This was a 4 player game...you could have that many humans playing or the computer would make up the balance.
You were given something like 12 years to make the colony prosper. Each year you were granted an additional plot of land. If you had a lot of money you could buy additional land during each turn.
Each turn had a time limit, longer if you had food and energy, shorter otherwise. You used this turn to install new MULEs on your land, or take assay samples for mining. Along with gambling at the end of your turn, you could also spend spare time running around the mountains, looking for the Wampus, a mysterious creature that blinked in the mountains while took your turn. The Wampus capture was worth money.
After each player had their turn, the game usually had some type of boon or calamity occur, among them, solar storms (increasing energy), fire at the store (reducing inventory and driving up prices), and pirates coming to steal ore.
In between turns came the auctions, which was the primary part of the game. Here you could buy and sell items from/to your fellow players or the colony store. This was a blast because you could get in bidding wars, run the prices up, overload the store inventory to lower prices, or even collude with a certain other player to sell him/her something and noone else. It was a blast running the food and energy prices up on those who were exclusively miners. This was most fun with 4 human players because the stupid computer had its own plans of how the bidding should go.
At the end of the game, a winner was chosen, and the colony as a whole received a rating. Generally it was easy to be a runaway winner, but then the colony overall suffered because the other players fared so poorly.
This was a pretty impressive game for its time. The graphics sucked but the gameplay more than made up for it. A lot of business principles could be had from the game.
This game was done by Ozark Softscape for Electronic Arts. Ozark had written other games including Seven Cities of Gold and Heart of Africa.