Despite having obsessed with it for a while, for casual players I wouldn't use Dominion. Its main downside is that serious play requires too much strategy, resulting in too much heads-down thinking about your hand and not enough interaction. I'd rather start people off with Carcassonne.
Dominion’s problem as a beginners’ game is that an even somewhat experienced player has a huge edge over a complete novice: even a passing familiarity with the cards will open up strategic combinations. In addition, they’ll have a hunch for when in the game they need to start accumulating victory points rather than expanding their monetary assets. That said, I love the game, and I think that it’s fairly easy to get into it.
How is that ever avoided though? I can not imagine a game where any amount of experience is not an advantage, where the game also has sufficient depth to be interesting.
Good point: unless it’s completely random it’s never entirely avoidable — there’s an element of skill. And I still think that Dominion can be very fun with beginners (that’s my experience at least).
That said, there are games that level the playing field without yielding entirely to chance; such as Dixit, where advantages are rather gained from knowing the other players.
I find Tanto Cuore makes a nice sweet spot - it's mostly as parallel as Dominion, but adds just enough interaction. Normally I'll get about 3/4 of the way through a game with newbies and then they'll go a couple of rounds of all buying me bad habits, and I'll smile because they've got it, and end up on a negative score.
