I have played "First Game" a lot. I feel your pain. I too am a Dominion pusher, so it kinda goes with the territory.
The thing is, "First Game" is a great board. It's simple but not too simple; it's got vanilla cards, trashers, drawers, an attack, some defense, everything. It teaches the fundamentals really well.
I think the most important part of "First Game" though— and this is a subtle thing— is
it has multiple choices at every price point.
Dominion is ultimately a game of making choices about what to buy, and the more choices you have, the more interesting any given game is.
So my advice is this: if you tweak the "First Game" just tweak one or two cards (Workshop and/or Woodcutter, I'm looking at you), and make sure you keep the cost spread pretty much the same. So 2, 2, 3, 3, 3, 4, 4, 4, 5, 5.
Rookies are notoriously Action-heavy, so while keeping the 8 of the 10 cards in the sub-5 range is kinda boring, it's also sort of necessity.
Here are some potential tweaks to spice things up for you, but still keep it relatively simple for them:
- Swap out Cellar for Courtyard - they both help massage poor draws in different ways.
- Swap out Militia for Bureaucrat - a slightly less overt Attack that nudges n00bs towards better money with the free Silver.
- Swap out ________ for Laboratory - Just to demonstrate the inversion and cost difference between Village and Laboratory.
- Swap out Workshop for Steward - Pawn leads to too much AP for new players, Steward is just right.
- Swap out Smithy for Envoy (if you have it… Amazon Big Box?) - It ups the interactivity, and keeps players engaged when it isn't their turn.
- Swap out Remodel for Moneylender - Remodel can be a tough sell to demonstrate the benefits of trashing, since those benefits are not seen immediately… Moneylender is a bit more tangible.
If you pick up Cornucopia next, Menagerie is huge for new players; it's cheap and they always seem have a hand with no duplicates. Probably because they're always buying one of everything. (<- I feel like this could be the basis of a really lame Dominion standup routine: "Man, you ever see a newbie during their Buy phase… they're all 'Oh, I'll buy one of these, and one of these…'")