Not sure on the German version, but the French version's winner circle was played, but it wasn't a carbon copy. You didn't have to give only lists, plus the giver could indicate how on or off topic the receiver was. It also had the most high-concept clocks in game show history with water filling a pyramid.
Main game in the French version however was drastically different:
First round was sort of like Password with betting, the giver would bet a certain amount of words needed for the receiver to get the clue. The giver had a total of 12 clues to bid for the five words. Getting all of the words below bid involved a bonus. After the five words, the received words then formed a puzzle à la Body Language.
Second round was pretty much straight Password. Since this show has been on so long, it is suffering from the problems later Passwords and Pyramids had, the clue givers are too good. One of the words that had to be guessed on an episode I saw was parallelepiped (a three dimensional parallelogram).
Because of the length of the games, there was only one winner's circle/nook/station/whatever. Also, the show tended to have the same celebrities for months at a time.
I once had a best of retrospective of Pyramide, but I lost it. Damn.
--Mike
