I’m an American working in Dubai. I work in education so we were among the first who understood how dire the corona situation was before people truly started to freak out. Being the extremely cautious person I am, I have been practicing social distancing since late February. Long story short, my kids are getting extremely bored of this style of life, and I’m getting desperate in trying new ways to keep them happy with minimum involvement being outside (most social environments are gradually shutting down anyway).

 I need recommendations for games that are extremely family friendly, fun, and hard to get bored of. Games that mom and pops can play with their kids as well. I’m willing to hunt down previous generation consoles. UAE has many retro video game shops. At this point I really don’t care about price. I just can’t take seeing my kids desperately looking to their parents to try to alleviate their boredness. Especially since I can’t always give them my full attention due to all the work and training I have to do preparing for distant teaching. The age of my oldest is almost 5 if that matters.

How about some boardgames for a change? Though they might be too young for most of those, but you might ease up the rules if necessary.

Considering that your kids aren't very old, I suppose I'd recommend something simplistic. Castle Crashers might be fun for them.

Party games with simple mini games Mario Party, Nintendo Land, board games, card games, Older 2D platformers with less controls to learn like a Yoshi game. Yoshi games are mostly easy and the latest on Switch hasa co-op mode so that you can help them when they get stuck.
Driving games that are more arcade like like Burnout, Ridge Racer, Mario Kart as opposed to Forza.
You can probably get a ton of old Skylanders or Disney Infinity stuff for dirt cheap now that they've stopped making the games.

I'll highly consider board games in the future but I'm more along the lines of something they can play with or without parent presence. I'm specifically looking at consoles and games. 

smash bros

Football is not part of the house culture. Mainly, I'm looking for advice on family/party games, since I wasn't a big part of the party game scene back when I would game heavily. I know very little about the wii or kinect, but I'm willing to move in that direction if it provides that family friendly party gaming experience I'm looking for. I know jack shit about the WiiU since I was completely absent from gaming in that year. Thank you nonetheless. If anything comes to you, follow up please.

This is exactly the kind of thing I'm looking for. Which Nintendo console should I shoot for? Considering that you considerably swayed me in the Mario direction. I'm looking at kart, racing, smash (thanks kirby007), and other mario mashups that the kids can play on their own, or with me. Should I go all the way back to the Wii? Or does the WiiU provide good enough versions of those games? I want to avoid switch since I believe its more a portable device.

I can't believe Mario slipped my mind. I'm getting fucking old.

Can anyone looking at this thread knowledgeable on kinect, please sell me on it. It is a genuine consideration.

For the first time in a while all of my immediate family is under the same roof so my sibilings and I play a lot of Mario Party from N64-Gamecube recently. Brings back memories and helps keep our minds off of all the doom and gloom.