WordSpiel - making words with that last letter

We did a test drive of a new card/word game this weekend, this time it was WordSpiel.  The basic idea is that you have to play a word using the last one, two or three letters of the last word played.  It started off easily:

The rules show the words building into a perfect spiral around the draw pile, but, well, that's never going to happen.  What a pain...

The first thing we decided was to reset the spread of played cards when it started to get too ragged.  Really, the game is so simple, there is no grand strategy, so we don't need to know every card that was ever played.

There, nice and tidy.  Goodbye, impossibly neat spiral.  Anyway, it was an enjoyable way to burn through some cards on a sunday afternoon and make sometimes funny combinations of words.  The only other rule of note is that if you get stuck without a word you can trade in up to three cards as your turn, or flip the top card from the draw pile after you first say whether you are going to keep it or use it to reset the last letter of the played cards.

It comes with a little card-sized 60-second timer, but we hate timers.  Just let the other player take a minute to come up with a word.  Why do we need electronics for that?   Most of the time we had a word ready to go in 10 seconds or less.

Overall, it was just too simple, and I can't picture us playing it a whole lot more than we already did.  We would grab the Bali deck or one of our many word apps instead.  But that is just how we roll.

August 2021 update: 

After dusting it off again, we came up with two additional rules that made it more interesting.  Instead of just counting up how many cards you've got left, try this: If a player makes a word of 5 or more letters, they get a token.  The easiest token is to just take the next card from the deck and keep it face down as a scoring mechanism.  Or pocket change.

The more interesting twist is making it legal to play letters BEFORE the last letters, as long as the insertion makes a valid word that uses the last letter on the pile.  So, if the last few letters were HEED, playing HEED-ED would be a normal play, and get a token for being over 5 letters.  With insertions, we can now play UN-HEEDED or (H)NEEDED.  Maybe take 2 tokens if your word has 8+ letters.  Then, you're just playing until the first player gets 10 tokens.  No timer, no scratchpad of little numbers.

Without these additional plays, the game gets really stale.  Each hand you start with a lot of possibilities.  One round started with A, and out of the blue I had -NDROID in my hand.  But the last two or three cards in a hand are usually just junk, and you take turn after turn throwing them away or adding more junk to the hand.  GK, junk.  Oh now I have GKV, that's wonderful ...