Thank you for the comment and the corrections! My english is not very good. :)
I did think about a more risk-vs-reward gameplay you mentioned but i started pretty late in the afternoon of the submission deadline day. I had an open card texas hold 'em drawing style in mind but i did not come up with good rules in that situation. I created the cards first and thought about gameplay later. I wanted the hand cards to decrease only and a playable game with very few cards left (in this case three, after all players took their hand cards). But most of all i wanted to finish the game and i'm glad i did. It's a shame that this jam did not get more entries. :/
So at the moment, the resulting gameplay is playing your opponent (next player), but the game will inevitably end eventually because he always has a chance of ~1:9 to match the first two cards from the drawing stack (because he can ignore your third card).
I don't know Quirkle, i'll have a look at it. :)