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If you play cribbage, you could also add in backgammon. Two could play one game, two the other. We love it. My husband and I also keep track of total wins and losses in cribbage, carrying on a tradition from my grandparents. We taped a piece of paper on the back of the board to record the wins.
I grew up playing Skippo. They are speciality cards (like Uno), anywhere from two to four players can play. It's a quick and easy game.
My brother and I keep track of wins and losses in cribbage too. We keep pegs on the side rows and when one reaches 7 wins they get a slash in a notebook I bought just for card games. He is currently beating me by 3 slashes, but I am the current champion three years running.
I thought of another simple family game that only requires paper and pencil.
HANGMAN!
My son and I played this game again and again - using different 'categories' to change the game. Sometimes we used the hangman drawings, mostly not.
It's Wheel Of Fortune without the wheel.
Spoons- my favorite. In college we always turned it into a drinking game.
Spit was my favorite growing up, but that can only be played with 2 people.
Palace
@sshole-I played it a lot in college as a drinking game but I don't think it's originally was one
All the others I know are drinking games......man I miss college.
I second Spit and BS (we called it President-- not sure why?). Also Signal is great and always a lot of fun. It's partner based so perfect for 4 people!
When my wife and I are traveling, we carry graph-paper notebooks, and in an hour of down-time, we play Battleships. Not a card game, but very entertaining and it remains challenging no matter how much you play.
It's an international game, that's not very popular in the US (except the hokey plastic dumbed-down version that comes in a Milton Bradley box). Graph-paper school notebooks are very cheap, the same price as lined notebooks, in every country in the world except the US.
I was going to suggest all of these. spoons makes us laugh so much! I do love BS too. No one knows how to play euchre here in Utah. I also like rummy, canasta, pinochle, and cribbage. My kids are 7 and 8 and love crazy 8's, old maid, go fish.
We got it for Christmas 2 years ago when my kids were 16 & 12. After playing several times a week for months, we started buying expansion packs. This game is so much fun, & every game is different from the time before. My son has brought it with him to friends' houses many times, & we've also had other adults come play it with us.
We played a game called Spit too, also called Speed by some. It was not a type of poker at all. It was a fast-paced, one-handed race to get rid of your cards. We played this at summer camp and loved it.
I totally remember that game. And yeah not poker. But poker's a great option for kids. In fact, teaching them variations of poker - 7-card stud, 5-card draw, straight poker, Acey-Deucey, One-eyed Jacks - teach not merely strategy, but really push decision-making and personal responsibility, in a very off-handed way. No one is responsible for -how- you handle your cards, except for you. And with poker, only a little of the game is luck. The rest is all strategic thinking, decision-making, and math.
Another card game I didn't see listed is Mille Bornes. We played that often when we were kids on rainy days. It's a french game, available in the USA. It even has a wiki entry, heh. Here's the paragraph explaining the object of the game - from Mille Bornes - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia :
Quote:
The premise of Mille Bornes is that the players are in a road race. Each race—or hand—is usually 700 miles (or kilometers) long, but the first player to complete that distance exactly has the option to declare an extension in which case the race becomes 1,000 miles. Mille Bornes is played with a special deck of cards. There are hazard,remedy,safety, and distance cards. Each hazard is corrected by a corresponding remedy, and is actually prevented from happening in the first place by a corresponding safety. The target distance is reached by playing distance cards.
Some days it'd go pretty quick but other days we'd have to set it aside and continue it after supper. There's a bit of a learning curve, but it's not too steep for kids. Once they learn the rules and what the cards mean, they can really dig into it and have fun.
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spoons makes us laugh so much! I do love BS too. No one knows how to play euchre here in Utah. 
I also like rummy, canasta, pinochle, and cribbage. My kids are 7 and 8 and love crazy 8's, old maid, go fish.
