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1.) Random monster pool. You can get a large and moving Torg on the first turn, which at worst crushes your team and at BEST blocks off certain areas of town forever. This is the biggest complaint of my friends who play rarely. It's just unfair.

2.) There's only 9-12 turns per game before a massive boss fight occurs, which isn't enough turns to get into the "feel" of things. There's HUGE stacks of adventures to be had in Miskatonic U, a haunted house, a greasy spoon, a foreboding forest, a lunatic asylum, a waterfront, and more. Sounds like fun! However, the strategy boils down to (a) get the retainer from the newspaper, (b) hang around the curio shoppe making money and buying up weapons while (c) sending the Gypsy or your spellcaster through gates and (d) winning.

This is the biggest complaint of my friends who play often(ish), because we spent about a hundred bucks on this stuff with the expectation that we'd have a variety of fun adventures in a great setting and instead it turns into the same thing over and over. The expansions add even more cards and locations that look super interesting but I'll never know because I'm in the fucking curio shoppe preparing for Astatoth. Even in the base game, there's plenty of things that require ~5 turns of dedication before they become useful (deputy, Silver Twilight Membership, Ma's Boarding house), during which your character isn't helping the team very much so these always get skipped.

3.) 4+ hours is too long considering how few things happen. "Ashcan Pete went to the Misk U., found a spell he couldn't cast, lost a fight to a vampire, recuperated in the hospital, went to the Dreamlands, found a motorcycle, and then got devoured by an Elder God. It took four hours." "Gilda got a retainer from the newspaper, bought an elder sign at the Curio Shoppe, went through two gates, sealed one, recuperated at the Asylum, and got devoured by an Elder God. It took four hours." All my friends are old faggots so the idea of playing a 4 hour game with a 30% chance of anybody winning is a hard bargain.

4.) The rules are hard to follow because there are a ton of exceptions at all times. Even my most experienced team (we've played a dozen games) still need the rulebook and wiki open to make sure we aren't skipping or overlooking some situational detail, yet we still miss certain things.

Do you have suggestions on any house rules to fix these? I could slow down the doom track to allow more time for exploration, but the game already takes 4+ hours even with players who know the rules. I could stagger the monster pool (having an 'easy' cup for the first few rounds and a 'hard' cup for later, or having a 'draw two monsters, play one') but that seems pretty cheap. I don't know! So far, the house rule is "Eh, let's play something else instead."