Bali (1954) - card game making words

I found a 1954 blue box version of the card game Bali in my collection of card decks.  Yes, if you put stuff away in the closet for years, seeing them again can be like going to the store.  Anyway, I remember trying it once before and being unimpressed, but this time we took some time to read the rules more closely and tinker a bit.  The tiny rulebooks from that era were full of ambiguous phrases, and just don't match the precision of modern rule sets now that decades of "rules lawyers" have hashed them out over gaming tables.

It turns out to be a solid game.  Let's focus on the two player game, since we are a two player gaming group.  You get 7 columns of cards, like in standard solitaire.  Each column is called a "panel", so each player has 7 panels where they will be building words or parts of words vertically downward.

The first few runs we tried it with just 5 panels, since it felt like 7 was too many.

So, each turn you can add onto any ONE of your panels by moving cards from any of your panels or any opponent panels, as long as what you build is a valid word of could be used in a valid word.  So "KFP" would be no good.  OR you can bank one of your completed words and score those points.

It's a fun combination of trying to get the letters you need, stealing from the other players and blocking them.  Words are scored by the points shown on the consonants (vowels have no value) times the number of letters in the word.

There is a bizarre rule for the final round, after the deck is exhausted, which says that if you can end up with completed words in all panels, you get a "Bali" bonus which triples the score for the entire game.  Which is nuts, and the tiny rulebook even says some players don't like this rule or use a doubling bonus instead.  It is hugely imbalancing, almost making all the other rounds meaningless.  Sure, maybe double the value of the words in just that final round.  A bonus is justified, but let's not go nuts with it.

Most of the way through each game, I could not think of a reason to keep partial words in any column.  Sure, if you get a QU, you can stash it and draw a new card, but it is just as easily stolen.

There is a fairly active community for Bali over on BoardGameGeek.  One player said the the tripling rule made him play the whole game differently, banking few words during initial rounds and hoping for a grand slam at the end.  Which in my mind shows that one rule throws off the whole game play.  Just let each round stand on its own, maybe double the final round if you Bali.

One rule I could not find a definitive answer for: there are one or two Bali cards in the deck, which are wild cards worth 5 points, but are they worth 5 points before or after multiplying by the number of letters in the word?