A nice fun game I just bought is Monopoly on the XBOX 360.
***I have a strategy that wins 90% of the time on my computer. When all the players have almost all of the property, you offer one of the players a free monopoly for all of the rest of his pieces and as much cash as he will depart with. Then you do the same thing with the next player. On the 3rd player in a 4player scenario, you’ll be trading monopolies, so you go for the cheaper ones versus his expensive ones or whatever he’ll trade with you. At this point, everyone has monopolies but you have most of the cash. Then you build. Now here’s the key: There’s only 32 houses in the game, so you build 32 houses. Cheaper properties are better with a strategy like this 32 houses is 2 monopolies of 3 and 1 monopoly of 2. If you can’t build all 32 houses, you make sure that no one else can add enough houses to go to hotels. Then you collect your cash — the other guys can’t build because there’s no houses. They’re sitting on beautiful monopolies like Marvin Gardens but with one or 2 houses while you have 12 houses on your properties.
This only works against computers. It will work against humans — once. But the cool thing is that after that, you’ll find the humans to be much more willing to trade than before.
Another excellent family game during cold winter days is Scene-it, they have a second edition out now.