When you initially discover the world of designer board games, you quickly realize it can be quite overwhelming to decide what game to buy, or even play to see if you like it. The number of games that are available out there is enormous not to mention the hundreds of new games that are published every year. Even a game like Pandemic, which plays very smoothly, can be a bit intimidating for someone that has never played a modern designer game before.
My solution to this problem was to find a game that had game mechanisms I was already familiar with. For me, that was a dice rolling game. From Monopoly to Sorry, from Yahtzee to Risk, pretty much every mass market game you can find at a big box store has some kind of dice rolling in it.