Right now, scoring is often trivially easy, with target words often being just a few letter-changes away (3-5 is typical, and even small teams normally have that many available), and being reachable in a single round of actions – the main strategy is in how early to go for it, and that’s introducing some unfortunate timezone dependencies.

Removing the ability to go through nonwords means that the routes tend to get a little longer, involving extra changes or synonyms. It’s still restorable if you need it, but you now have a couple of dollar signs to work through first before you can break the rule, rather than being able to rely on a “every sword” remaining from a previous route.