A part of the reason Big Money (
http://wiki.dominionstrategy.com/index.php/Big_money ) is so effective is that it's very simple to get right. Often, especially in the base set, the engine that will beat big money has many interlocking parts - Geronimoo's First Game engine (linked earlier in the thread) requires proper use of Remodel, Village, Smithy, Market, AND Militia to do better, and you have to get the pieces in a good order and use them right (including thinking ahead when deciding when to buy villages). So someone learning to build engines will probably have a lot of losses at first - when you get too few villages, or too many, or forget trashing or buy green too early or too late, etc. Lots of places to go wrong, compared to the simple "Buy silver, then gold, then province" rules of Big Money.
So for a newer player, a situation where "a properly played, intricate engine will crush big money, but a badly-made engine will lose" is often indistinguishable from a situation where Big Money is straight-up dominant, without asking the internet or something like that.
So there are a few ways to go.
1) Pick up an expansion or two. Seaside has some of the most powerful cards that make engine-building easy - fishing village and wharf. Prosperity has Colony/Platinum and Goons. If you have Fishing Village and Wharf on the board, it's pretty easy to just buy fishing villages and wharves and do better than big money.
2) Deliberately pick more engine-y setups. In the base set, if you include chapel, you'll instantly enable engines on lots of boards.
3) Play to improve rather than playing to win. It might take you a few tries to play the First Game engine well enough to beat Big Money, but once you do you'll start being able to do similar things on other boards.
For me, I ended up going with the first option. I started playing online with a few expansions, and at first I would just play lots of Big Money. I started with just playing engines in the places where engines are obvious (Fishing Village+Wharf; Steward+Minion; Village+Torturer); then I started making more subtle engines like Remodel-based ones. But for IRL play, (2) or (3) would also work if you don't want to add expansions.
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