I *love* MULE and remember playing it for hours on and old Atari 800.

I had forgotten how *slow* it was to play a full game, though. We used to play a single game over lunch hour.

In today's world, there's no need for it. So much of it can be skipped. You need some sort of "speed mode". Here are the things that could be skipped with an appropriate click:
1. If you are playing a robot, a click should show what the robot did rather than make you wait through the bot's whole entire turn.

2. When preparing for your own turn, it should just show the event as a line immediately rather than scrolling it. No need to wait for it. At the very least, let me click to immediately go to my turn.

3. The countdown of 4 seconds to my turn should be skipped if I hit the space bar.

4. When there is no auction for a particular item because it is out, no need to go through the whole auction. Just say it's skipped somewhere on the screen.

5. The production process is agonizing; rather than do all players entering it, can skipping the production just be a setting at the beginning of the game for the player that initiates it?

6. It should be possible to opt out of an auction (up/down/left?). If all players opt out of an auction or only bots are left, just show the result rather than showing the auction.

Two other features that don't speed the game up, but help alot:

7. If I accidentally hit the return key, the game gets stuck in a mode where space and arrows only type those things in the chat box. That's agonizing if you accidentally do it during your turn. Chat should be turned off so you can't accidentally hit it when you're in the middle of an event where you're timed.

8. I remember the biggest annoyance with the original game is that when you clicked up or down to choose buyer and seller, then wanted to be first off the mark, you'd accidentally switch from buyer to seller or vice versa. That was not a behavior that should be brought over to this version. Somehow allow choosing of buyer or seller, with a *default* being determined by whether you are over or under. Once all players have chosen, *then* count down from 2 to the actual running.

Thanks so much for bringing MULE back. I missed it...

Tubby