Good introduction. A few of the things that makes M.U.L.E. shine are:

• Scale of production. Two of your own plots next to eachother, producing the same thing makes both produce more. If you have at least three plots anywhere on the screen producing the same thing, you get another bonus (more than 3 doesn’t affect this further). This means you have to plan ahead where to place your plots and what to use them for.
• Supply and demand system. Smithore is used to produce new mules, so a shortage of smithore will make mules more expensive until there are no more to buy. Food affects time, so a shortage will make everyone have less time to develop their plots. Energy affects production, so a shortage means you won’t get any more production. Crystite is the bonus item that ranges randomly in value (like a modern day bitcoin perhaps) so you gamble if you want to sell it now or keep onto it. If you are the sole producer of a commodity and the store is out, you can refuse to sell until the price has skyrocketed, even accepting spoilage of unused items instead of selling too cheap. Yes, very capitalistic system but you also learn to balance how much you want to help others (sell cheap) in order that you don’t get stuck in your own development.
• Total colony advancement. The player with the highest score wins, but also the total colony score is counted and it can be just as much of a challenge to get a well working, luxurious colony as being the only rich player in an underdeveloped, poor world.

That combined with the random events and overall planning ahead makes it a great board game. It took some 30+ years before it was even converted to a licensed real board game (Finnish publisher IIRC), though the developer had to make some shortcuts to convert the computer game to be playable in an analog world.

Those who never get to understand these mechanisms probably think M.U.L.E. is just a dull computerized board game with very simple graphics.