Programming a solver for a video game is a simple way for students to become engaged with solving complex problems within CS1 courses. This assignment involves writing a partial solver for the Alphabear video game, which is to find English words among letters present on a board with decreasing timers. The goal of the game is to maximize earned points, and using each letter before its timer runs out achieves that goal. This partial solver is to determine the “best” word choice at a given point in the game. Students here are to assign a weight to each word, which is specified in the assignment, and to find any word of smallest weight. Some skills necessary to solve the assignment are reading potentially large files, designing a nontrivial algorithm to calculate which word is best, and being exposed to different weighting functions.