In addition to Ticket to Ride, some other favorites in our house:
Trivia style:
Outwageous: Players advance around a board by answering questions in a half dozen categories correctly. However, everyone bets on the ability of the player answering to answer correctly (including the player answering). Winner is the one who obtains the highest chip count (there is a set winning total, but you can shorten the game by stopping play at any time and counting chips).
Wits & Wagers: 7 rounds...in each round, all of the players write an answer to the same question. The answer is always a number (date, amount, percentage). Answers are then laid out in order from lowest to highest and players bet on which answer is closest without going over. Our grandkids as young as 8 years old have enjoyed this game, because even if their guess is hopelessly wrong, they can still bet on the correct answer.
Chronology: Players take turns trying to guess where an event on a card will fall in the timeline they have established with previous answers (ie: between 1573 and 1989). Dates range across 2000 years. If a player misses, the next player has the opportunity to steal the card, and it progresses until someone gets it right or it goes all the way around.
Perfect 10: A little tougher. Two teams; ten multiple choice questions (different for each team). You use colored magnets to mark which answer you think is correct. After the magnets are all placed, you check the answers of the opposite team, and tell them how many they have correct (but not WHICH ones are correct). You then have the opportunity to correct your answers, and the other team again tells you how many you have correct (but again, not which). Strategy plays a big part in narrowing down the right/wrong answers. This continues until one team gets all 10 correct. One downside - the design of the playing board makes it tough to have more than 2-3 people on a team. I would say teenage or older for this one.
Non-trivia games:
Six Cubes: Plays much like Farkle but uses a board instead, making it easier to track scores. Has "jump ahead" spaces to add interest. Six dice: 4 white, 1 red, 1 green. Red & green dice change the way the six dice are counted.
Bananagrams: Best described as a Scrabble free-for-all. Players build their own crosswords, racing against other players to use up all of their tiles (and all of the tiles in the pool). Crosswords can be rearranged repeatedly. Same word rules as Scrabble - no proper names, abbreviations or foreign words (unless they are common usage in English - example, rendezvous). Requires a decent vocabulary. Our oldest grandkids like it; if we play with the younger ones, we play veeeeeerrrrrryyyyy slowly.
