As someone who recently built a daily word game[1], I 100% get it. I can say from first hand experience: there's an awful lot of words that are totally valid but not fun.
I spent approximately as much time on building the word list as I did developing the game. The author's technique of just grabbing a word list and spellchecking it is completely not sufficient, you will get so many weird unfamiliar words in there. In the end I was able to whittle down my list to about 24,000 using various automatic methods, but from that point I just had to do a manual review on the remaining list, which meant I got to see a lot of words, and many of them felt very obscure and/or not fun.
I spent approximately as much time on building the word list as I did developing the game. The author's technique of just grabbing a word list and spellchecking it is completely not sufficient, you will get so many weird unfamiliar words in there. In the end I was able to whittle down my list to about 24,000 using various automatic methods, but from that point I just had to do a manual review on the remaining list, which meant I got to see a lot of words, and many of them felt very obscure and/or not fun.
1: shameless plug: https://wheybags.com/turntiles