Planet M.U.L.E.

By: Paul Eres

On: February 16th, 2010

Planet M.U.L.E. is a remake of the classic economic multiplayer game M.U.L.E., and done with permission of the Bunten family. If you didn’t play the original the video above explains some of the basics. I’ve really been having a lot of fun with this game; it’s most fun if you play with people you know (I’ve been playing with #tigirc folk Mr. Podunkian, Eva-Jolli, Ortoslon, BlademasterBobo, Dragonmaw, etc. — thanks for helping me learn the game). It’s a beautiful design, it’s one of the few games that feels like it takes intelligence to do well in.

There’s quite a lot of complexity and that comes out of the game’s rules, with a large number of possible strategies. There are a few optimum strategies that you’ll gravitate towards after you’ve seen how the experts play the game, but even those tend to be undermined by the actions of new players who don’t really get the game (or parts of it), so sometimes the player who winds up winning is the person who can figure out the psychology of the worst player and take advantage of that player. Alternatively, sometimes a bad player can ruin the game for everyone else by having the entire colony fail (although that’s rare).

There are a lot of cosmetic and minor rule changes from the original, but for the most part I think they make sense and are improvements. For instance, the time counter during auctions now counts down faster if nobody is moving, instead of forcing everyone to wait when it’s clear nothing else will get done that auction. And the game seems to be (from its blog) in active development, with more improvements released periodically.

The main negatives are inherent in it being multiplayer-only: you sometimes have to wait ages for strangers to play with if you don’t know anyone willing to play it with you, and when someone loses their connection or leaves the game they’re replaced with a boring bot (which seem to have only basic AI and will always lose if you know what you’re doing). The ranking system is also kind if simplistic; it’s based on total wins rather than any kind of Elo-style rating system, which I think would be more appropriate.

If any of you are interested in playing the game with other people but don’t know anyone with the patience to learn such a nonstandard game, come to the chatroom #tigirc on irc.esper.net and see if anyone there is interested.