User:Adalbert Zollern/Sandbox

Physical Puzzles are puzzles that involve physical objects given to teams. Solving the puzzle may or may not require manipulation of the object in physical space.

Background
Some hunts have featured rounds consisting entirely of physical puzzles.

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 are 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 is unlocked before interacting with.

Physical Puzzles can come in basically any form; the most common of these is paper printouts, although every kind of medium from food and floppy disks to balloons and balsa wood have been used in the past.

Strategies
Physical puzzles vary wildly in construction; 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.

The solver may, at some point during the solve, be tasked with irreversibly mutilating or destroying a physical puzzle.