Physical Puzzle

Physical Puzzles are puzzles that involve physical objects given to teams.

Background
Some hunts have featured rounds consisting entirely of physical puzzles; these include the Treasure Chest round from 2015 and the Build section of Hacking Island from 2018.

Puzzle Application
Physical Puzzles are most prominently featured in major in-person puzzlehunts like the MIT Mystery Hunt, where they can be easily distributed. Often, puzzlers will need to signal HQ that they wish to receive the puzzle by submitting a special phrase to the answer checker. The 2021 and 2022 MIT Mystery Hunts were special exceptions; due to restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, the physical puzzles were instead mailed to solvers wishing to do them ahead of time, with explicit instructions to wait until the corresponding puzzle was unlocked before interacting with it.

Physical Puzzles can come in basically any form; media from food and floppy disks to balloons and balsa wood have been used in the past.

List of puzzles known to involve a physical medium
This table only documents puzzles after the 2000 MIT Mystery Hunt. Puzzles involving paper printouts are not noted if the physical nature of the puzzle is irrelevant to solving the puzzle, so as not to include entire pre-Internet MIT Mystery Hunts in the definition of "Physical Puzzle".

Strategies
Physical puzzles vary wildly in constitution; as such, no one strategy can apply to the whole set at once. Strategies for solving them are highly similar to strategies for solving their non-physical counterparts, with the only difference being that all manipulation takes place in physical space as opposed to the more familiar digital medium.

There is, however, no easy undo button in most physical puzzles. Accidentally up-end a physical jigsaw and it will take just as long to recover the original state; mutilate a part of an object and it stays that way forever. Care must be taken around irreversible actions; this is particularly relevant if the puzzle eventually asks the solver to destroy the object to obtain a hidden clue.