"War of the Words" design problem: strategy vs. ac

Hi! I've been test playing "War of the Words" with a bunch of people and taking it to games nights. I've gotten a lot of feedback.

And it's basically split straight down the middle.

Here's the problem. It's basically a variation of word rummy where people have to make one of the words in their hands. The player's letter cards are face up and visible to all opponents, so they have to be careful not to be too obvious about picking letters for their word "gee, they have UEEN and I see that QUEEN is in the word list [everyone gets a word list of all the words in the deck of word cards], so I think I'll make sure not to give that guy the Q..."

The problem involves how many words each player has in his hand. Obviously, one word won't work because he can just be blocked. So we need more than one. I found from experience that with most words 4 or 5 letters, you can't really going after more than two words at the same time with a seven-letter rack. So, I made the number of words 2.

Well, I started test-playing it. I found that it often took too long to make words -- the action was slow. So I pushed it up to 3. With 3, however, it was more difficult for the opponents to figure out what you were building. The strategy wasn't as complex. So I dropped it back down to 2. All of the gamer friends suggested that I stay with 2.

I took the 2-card version to a games night and they said "speed it up -- I suggest 3 cards". But these people were new to the game and weren't thinking strategy.

What's the best way to handle this? I was thinking of adding a "Toggle Word Number" card to the deck. People start out with 2 cards, and when this card is played (and the player chooses to invoke the action) everyone switches to 5-x cards. To go from 2 to 3, everyone draws a card. To go from 3 to 2, everyone chooses one card and discards it. The problem is that there are already 7 different types of special action cards, and I'm concerned we're making the game too complex. This card would require an 8th action card, and there had been ideas for a 9th card as well but I figured that was too much.

Thanks in advance,

ACG