My go-to games for non-gamers (who are the majority of people I play with, lately) are these two:

1. Musette – it’s a genre-agnostic storytelling game of my design. Rules are easy to understand, we start with a familiar (if cliche) genre they know from TV or movies, and we go for it.

2. Monsterhearts – if they liked that and aren’t afraid to play characters more in depth, I pull out Monsterhearts. I think it would be wrong for some players (e.g. young children, perhaps), but for most people it’s instant understanding/emotional buy-in.

I also use a Fiasco playset I wrote to start the game of Monsterhearts, but that’s a whole ‘nother thing. Makes it easy to get people into the genre, though! No paralysis here – we can just go and go.