Weezoh: Amun Re sort of has the M.U.L.E. play sequence in that you auction off areas of the board in a semi-concurrent fashion, then produce goods, which allow you to develop your current spaces and buy new ones, etc. Power Grid kind of has that too, but in that case you’re auctioning off the means to develop your land (the power plants) instead of the land itself. There are other games, I’m sure, but I can’t think of any more off hand. I doubt that any of their playstyle came from M.U.L.E. directly.

seeing the board game links has prompted me to download qule to possibly try out.

are there any published board games that you know of that rely heavily on the mule play style/sequence?

The Apple Macintosh, so far as I know, was not introduced to supersede or replace the Apple II family, which continued to be manufactured and sold even into the 90s. The Apple IIc, IIcPlus, and the IIGS were all introduced after 1984, and as far as I can tell were intended to be parallel product lines to the Macs.

I have many fond memories of my Apple IIGS, which I bought in 1987, and while I never played M.U.L.E., I did play many other games which I’m sure you’ll be covering in the future.

Just a little technical clarification.

And thanks for the corrections. I felt I was missing a few items from my coverage of M.U.L.E. and I was planning a patch-up for the next show. Your comments help a lot.

-The mountain wampus could be caught without a mule as bait. The reward increased as the game went on.

-The different races had slight differences in either mining, (the Bonzoid) or farming (the smiling pac-man looking guy, who’s name escapes me.) One other handicap for the human was they went through food very fast. Usually you could get a mule on two plots and still hit the pub. The human could get only one, two if the were VERY close, and you didn’t go to the pub.

-The price of a mule was twice the price the at which the store would buy smithore. I _think_ it took two smithore to produce one mule.

-Any attempt to put a mining mule on the river would result in a lost mule.

-There were only a few layouts as far as the mountains/chrystite fields were placed. Played enough times, you could memorize where the chrystite was.

-You had mentioned that the computer players were experts at resourse management. I have to disagree somewhat. In the C64 version, the computer would overcompensate for shortages or prices. This would involve heavy mining of smithore in the begining, and then heavy chrystite mining later in the game. If there is a high price to a resourse, the computer will remove and reoutfit mules to overproduce a resourse, shrinking their reserves. This can be bad if you rely on their surplus of the resourse that is no longer produced.

Those are just my top-of the head thoughts. Oh, and thank you for putting the theme song at the end. I am embarassed to admit that as much as I love the theme, it was a few beats into it that I recognized it.

Keep the great podcasts coming. A few requests:

Seven Cities of Gold
Archon
Ogre

Thanks again,
Joey Konyha

Now do a podcast Archon. I demand it!