Dominion is the progenitor of the whole genre and it still shows people the shape of a deckbuilder faster than anything that came after it tried to improve on. Takes about three minutes to explain, everyone starts with the same seven coppers and three estates, and by turn four they already understand why buying a silver over an action card might be the wrong call. I’ve taught it to people who’d never played a hobby game in their life and watched it land clean.
Base set alone holds up fine but loses some of its shine after enough sessions with the same ten kingdom cards, I noticed that lull myself a few years in, fewer decisions feeling fresh, more games playing out the same way. Where it comes back to life is the expansions, and specifically the ones that add cards doing more than one thing at once, a reaction card here, a split-pile mechanic there, though I appreciate that the base set kept those complications out entirely so a first-time player isn’t drowning in exceptions on turn one.
Player interaction in the vanilla game is lower than people expect walking in, it’s mostly a solitaire optimization puzzle you’re racing against someone else’s solitaire optimization puzzle, and that’s either exactly your speed or a dealbreaker depending what you want from a game night. Attack cards in later sets fix that if it bothers you, at the cost of some of the game’s original cleanliness.
If I’m being picky, I still wish it shipped with some kind of proper shuffler, my table’s gone through actual card damage over the years from how often this one gets reshuffled mid-game. Small complaint for a game I’ve owned longer than most of my furniture.