Three Dragon Ante rocks. Every time I play it with folks at Manawerx, folks have fun. Even if they haven't played it before, it's not too hard to grok the basics during the first game and figure it all out after that. Ya don't even have to be winning to have fun.
Youngest folks I've played Three Dragon Ante with have been, ohh, maybe 12 or 14 years old? So I dunno if it'd be any difficulty for a 9-year old, but it certainly isn't tough to learn.
Kaladhan: It's a non-collectable card game, and it's a bit like Poker, sort of, vaguely, kinda. You buy one deck (there's only one kind, unlike a CCG, and the cards are taller and thinner than normal playing cards), and the whole group uses that deck.
You can play with as few as 2 players, or as many as, what is it, 6 or 8 maximum? It's really best to play with around half a dozen people. Once the deck is used up, you just reshuffle the discard pile and turn it face-down to be the new deck. Play goes until someone loses all their "gold", in other words the tokens or money they're playing with (normally you just use tokens, but you can easily play it with real money if you feel like it). Once someone runs out of gold, you keep playing until the end of the "gambit", which is a set of 3 or more rounds (3 unless people tie for highest score in that gambit, in which case you continue rounds until the tie is broken). If that person still has no gold at the end of the gambit, the game ends and whoever has the most gold wins.
Normally a game will last around, oh, maybe 1-2 hours, or more if you have several players and they're all being clever enough to avoid losing all their gold (I think the longest game I played was about 3-4 hours with a group of 6 players, most of us trying to keep the game going by messing everyone's strategies up). It can end a bit sooner if you just have 2-3 players and one of them does poorly.
