the way you describe "cohere" is great, you could just take this paragraph and put it in the rules. it's an explicit rule : "interpret this rules as you feel / want". in fact, many experimental games have this as rule ;)
I'm pointing this, because culturally I'm used to the fact that card games' rules are very explicit if not otherwise stated (epecially with traditional 52+2 card'sz deck in use) but again this is my perspective as game designer.
For Ghazal I tried matching figures, I though of matching suites but I never had any. I did not understand how to put the verse with the couplets. the free phase was cool. In the end I just tried to make 3-5 word phrases at random. I admit i enjoyed my solitaire game more.
To solve the rules length problem you could maybe imagine this as a small zine, with the letters you've put in separate files and have one page where you just list the games with a brief description + photo and then a separate page for each game rules, use more images (ex. photos of example games), have more examples.
I really enjoyed the fact that it is a physical game, and though making a digital game gives opportunity to have more words etc. I fiand that "playing"/"toying" with this poem is it's biggest quality. I would rather iterate on this version, make it more accessible, quicker to set etc. rather that going digital but it's your call :)
players can always use tape to paste our own words just like you did. I mean the rules for the game could be litteraly: "take an old deck of cards and paste this list of word on them" ;)