Thread bump as I just spent this last week up in Branson with my parents and my 8 and 13 yr old. They rented a nice condo out in Indian Point that was only a short 10 min car ride into town.
All my kids wanted to do was live at the go kart tracks. I've inhaled so much small engine exhaust, it probably cut a few years off my lifespan. Well worth the money for them to have fun.
Rented a boat on Table Rock Lake - highly recommend
Top of the Rock: We did the golf cart tour early in the week when the heat index was 105+ and it was miserable as fuck. By the end, I was just ready to get back and get in some A/C. Would have been a lot nicer if we had done it later in the week after a front blew through and the high temp was 87. Also, the Ancient Ozarks Natural History Musuem tour comes with your ticket for the canyon tour. Their website description doesn't do this place justice. TONS of Indian artifacts, like a disgusting amount that left me wondering how the fuck they were able to collect all of it. It was an overwhelming amount. Also lots of cool civil war stuff.
Titanic museum: This was better than I thought it would be. They give you a boarding pass with a passenger bio and you find out if you lived or died at the end of the tour. My boys got a big kick out of the fact that out of our group, I was the only one that died. I was obsessed with everything Titanic as a kid so I already knew a good bit of the history but my kids seemed to enjoy it and actually learned a few things.
I'd like to come back someday to do more outdoor stuff like play golf, rent another boat and go fishing, etc. This trip was more for my boys to have fun so I spent the most time bouncing around the go kart tracks in town. Also doesn't help that my parents both have bad knees and I am nursing a sprained achilles and it seems everything out there is stairs and hills. I was supposed to come out here a couple years ago and stay at Big Cedar Lodge via a vendor I deal with at work but at the last minute, our new VP nixed it because said vendor was about to bid on a requisition we were putting out and he didn't like the optics of them bringing us out there. In the end, the req didn't even happen so I got fucked out of an all expenses paid trip. Still a little salty about it.