Highlights
- Including clever D&D puzzles in your game can be incredibly satisfying as players crack the code and find solutions.
- Letting players solve puzzles in unique ways or come up with silly solutions can be just as fun as sticking to traditional methods.
- Diverse puzzle ideas, such as ghost ships, freezing tunnels, and brewing potions, can be adapted to suit your players and add variety to your campaigns.
Dungeons & Dragons has something for everyone, from those just starting to experts. You can battle monsters, plunge through dungeons or simply hang out at the local tavern. No matter what your players enjoy in a session, it's always good to have variety.
It can be tempting to stick to combat and role-play encounters, but it can be incredibly satisfying to include a few clever D&D puzzles as well. Observing your players eagerly discussing your clues and eventually cracking the code to a mystery is always a joy. Fortunately, there are many unique puzzles to include in your games, some easy, some more challenging. Here are a few of them.
Updated August 12, 2023 by Luke Ackroyd: There are few things more satisfying than a collection of good DnD puzzles. Your players feel accomplished when they manage to find a solution, especially if it was particularly challenging or they found a unique way to solve it. Never be afraid to let your players solve one of your fun DnD puzzles in a new way that you have not thought of if it seems like an equally great solution. As long as the players are having fun and are not stumped for too long, puzzles make a great addition to your next session.
So, if you are eager for more DnD puzzle ideas, this list has you covered. From DnD dungeon puzzles full of traps to fun and simple puzzles you can place anywhere within your campaign, even more suggestions have been added for you to try. You can adapt each idea to suit your players and your setting, so use them as inspiration to craft your ideal challenge.
Ghost Ship
Your players reach a river that seems more like an ocean, with no sign of the other side in view. Crossing seems impossible until a spooky ghost ship arrives, offering them safe passage across the water. Once the boat sets sail, the ghostly pirates begin to sing sea shanties that become increasingly confusing and dire. It becomes clear that the ship is lost, passing the same landmarks in the water repeatedly, yet the ghosts continue singing sad songs about being lost at sea. The party might be lost with them forever if they don't act quickly.
To solve the puzzle of how to get back to dry land, the players must find a map of the mysterious ocean river and convince the pirates to head in the right direction, passing the correct landmarks in a set order. Of course, it isn't that simple, as your players will need to come up with new sea shanties to tempt the pirates to sing that are linked to the landmarks they need to reach. It's a fun, creative puzzle where your players get to come up with silly lyrics and sing along with the ghosts.
Reverse Puzzles
If you've been playing with the same group for a while for a long-term campaign, your players have likely encountered a lot of puzzles already and might feel pretty confident that they can solve them. So, this encounter is designed to test their memory of many mini-puzzles. The scenario begins with the party entering an already-explored dungeon. All the traps and puzzles have been solved or destroyed, making it easy to stroll through until they reach the treasure.
As soon as one of the adventurers picks up the loot, the surrounding dungeon trembles as all of the puzzles reset. Now to leave, the players will have to retrace their steps through each room, trying to remember the solutions in reverse order. You can fill this dungeon with many simple DnD puzzles; the real challenge is a memory game of what solutions fit which rooms in what order.
Trigger Words
DnD 5E puzzles often involve lots of discussion between the players about how to solve them. This puzzle uses that to your advantage, so this is an excellent option if you have a talkative group. The party finds themselves in a room full of sliding doors and deadly gadgets, such as spinning blades and swinging axes. It seems almost impossible to get past, and as the players begin to discuss their options, they notice that some of the traps stop and particular doors open. As they discuss further, the traps activate again, and different doors slide open and close.
Eventually, the heroes will realize that certain words are triggering different room components. It might be a commonly used word such as 'the' or 'and,' or perhaps to really confuse your players, the triggers might be linked to tone of voice. If they speak in a panic, their voice triggers certain traps and doors, while an angry tone activates other parts of the room. Together your players will have to figure out what phrases or tones they need to communicate to navigate the dangerous space safely.
The Freezing Tunnel
This next puzzle would fit well in an Arctic setting but could also fit in any dungeon or tomb your players are exploring. The players must get through a long tunnel, which has completely frozen solid. With their weapons and spells, they can start to chip away at it slowly, but over time it continues to freeze again, putting them at risk of getting frozen in place. As an additional threat, the tunnel is full of frozen monsters that awaken when freed from the ice.
The puzzle of navigating this tunnel involves putting a lot of pressure on the players, as they must attempt to defeat the monsters while simultaneously chipping away at the ice before it freezes everyone. This puzzle has a relatively simple solution if the players notice it. The monsters they defeat have parts of them, such as magical claws or sharp, glowing limbs, that they can use to break each chunk of ice before them instantaneously. This allows the players to race through the tunnel fast enough not to get caught by the rapid cold.
Brewing Potions
This lighthearted puzzle allows your players to get creative with potions. The party finds themselves working for a potion brewer that needs them to meet the demands of their eccentric, demanding customers. The party is put in a room full of lots of potions, all with vague, unhelpful labels, and must mix these potions together to create new concoctions to fulfill the strange requests.
For example, a customer wants a potion to help them swim in a frozen lake without feeling cold. The party grabs a potion of Diving and a potion of Campfire and combines them to get the effects of underwater breathing and cold resistance. For a sillier approach to that potion puzzle, perhaps they combine a fishy potion and a potion of hot sauce to give the customer temporary gills and a sensation of having their mouth on fire to keep them warm.
You can get creative with the puzzling requests, so make sure to have a vast selection of potions ready to be mixed together and let the players go wild with their ideas to solve each need.
Size Matters
Mazes can make for great D&D puzzles, and there are many ways to make them creative and unique each time you introduce one. This time, your players enter a puzzle room and find multiple archways of varying heights, all glowing in different colors. Whenever someone walks through one of these archways, their size is drastically changed, making them tiny, gigantic, or anywhere in between.
This limits where they can go in each room of this maze by being too small to reach some archways and too big to fit through others. Working as a team, they'll have to figure out the best way to get around each room. They can even work together by having one giant PC hold a smaller one up to reach a high-up archway. Throughout this puzzle, they will all repeatedly change sizes, trying to find the best way to navigate the maze.
The Winning Moves
When developing puzzles for DnD, looking at other types of puzzles that already exist, such as in board games, is helpful. There are lots of games that have a puzzle element to them that can really get you thinking. With this puzzle idea, your players enter room after room with giant versions of classic board games, such as Chess or Scrabble. These games are already at a late stage, and it becomes clear that the players must select the winning moves in each scenario. If they get it right, the door will unlock to let them progress.
As an example, in the giant Scrabble board room, the players must pick a word to earn enough points to win the game at the last turn. They'll carry the over-sized tiles to the grid to boost their team's score to victory. For Chess, the opponent's pieces are just two or three turns away from checkmate, and the players must pick the right moves to avoid that and claim checkmate themselves. With so many board and card games out there, you have many options for scenarios to present to your players.
Twisted Tales
A library has fallen into chaos and needs the players to help. The place is overrun with characters from fiction that have been unleashed from the books they came from. Some of these characters have also merged together to complicate matters. It is now up to the players to deduce what characters came from which classic stories, find the appropriate book from the library, and capture them back into the pages.
Your party will have to interact with each escaped character, listening out for hints of what book they might be from. As a simple example, the players might meet a sleepy character who appears to be a half-wolf half-grandmother and deduces that they must grab a book about Sleeping Beauty and one about Little Red Riding Hood. You could also adapt any classic work of literature, or perhaps even a film, into a D&D alternative for the players to find in the library. For example, instead of The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe, they could need to find The Manticore, The Hag, And The Mimic from the shelves.
Silent Communication
This is a fun, simple puzzle you could include in any dungeon or other location where the party gets split up. The rooms that they are in are full of magic, hindering their ability to communicate with one another. They cannot speak directly, but they can still see one another. This might be through a magical mirror on one side of the room, or perhaps some of the party appear as ghostly forms around their friends.
Each side of the party has information that the others need. But, they need to communicate with gestures and charades if they want any chance for their friends to understand what they are trying to get across.
If you are playing online and without cameras to see the players, you could adapt this puzzle so the characters can only give one-word clues to guide their friends. Whether it is gestures or vague hints, this is a silly, chaotic puzzle that will surely be a hit with the group. Your players might even start getting creative with this puzzle, using cantrips such as minor illusion to aid them. This is a fun puzzle that can go along with other puzzles and tricks you have in store for your party.
The Flooded Chambers
During a spelljamming adventure, the party finds a planet that is almost nothing but water, except for a large flooded structure. Venturing inside, they discover that navigating the various large chambers here is practically impossible, as different routes are engulfed with deep water. One of your party will likely spot some valves that can be turned to lower or raise the water levels of each chamber.
These valves can be removed and attached to different systems, but the players only have access to a limited amount of them. They must work together to navigate these chambers. They might raise the water levels to push a floating platform up high. They might drain a room of water to allow them to reach a doorway they couldn't hold their breath long enough to get to before. This is a potentially deadly maze if the party isn't cautious with what valves to turn.
This does not need to be in a Spelljamming setting. You can place this sort of flooded structure anywhere in your campaign. This puzzle allows for lots of creativity to be used to solve it. Will they make makeshift valves to bypass parts of the puzzle? Will they attempt to brute force it and hold their breath? Hopefully, your party will get pretty creative with their solutions.
The Ceiling Is Falling!
As the party navigates a mysterious mansion, they enter a room full of clutter and strange decorations. The ceiling begins to lower slowly. The walls around them begin to move in too. The doors to the room have vanished completely. This is a timed puzzle. They need to figure out how to stop the surfaces from moving in or find a way to survive. There are plenty of solutions you could go with. There could be paintings around the room, showing people in certain positions or interacting with particular objects.
If the party stands in these positions, they will be in just the right spot to slip into subtle holes in the ceiling and walls. They will be trapped for a moment but alive as they wait for the walls and ceiling to rise again. Another solution could be that certain items in the room are incredibly sturdy. If the party can use them as a blockade, they can stop the ceiling from being able to move down any further.
This is another puzzle that also acts as a trap. It is a quick puzzle that your party should hopefully resolve within a few moments. If not, they could get seriously hurt. So, perhaps an emergency solution is available, too, if the party struggles. For example, maybe a tiny gap opens up when they are almost crushed, and if they react in time, they can slip through and escape.
Past And Future
The party walks into a mysterious clearing in the forest. At the outskirts of this clearing is a mysterious glowing pool of green liquid. Some of it has already been put into potion vials ready for consumption. The party has been sent here to collect an artifact, but it appears missing or impossible to reach.
The party will soon learn that the solution is impossible at their current time. By drinking the green liquid, they are transported into the distant past. Drink the liquid again, and they are back in the present. The landscape is drastically different in both time periods. Perhaps the party jumps between before and after a kingdom falls into ruin.
They need to alter things in the past to make it easier to progress in the future. For example, they might need to cut down a tree so it does not block their path in the future. They might need to climb a stairway in the past, jump and drink the green liquid simultaneously to be transported back to the present, where they know a different platform will be. This is a mind-bending puzzle. They have to think in four dimensions instead of three. But, with enough jumping back and forth, they can reach the hidden artifact.
Fun With Portals
The party stumbles upon a room full of bright, multicolored portals. When they turn around, the door they walked through is gone. They have no choice but to venture through the portals to try and find their way out. Each portal brings them to a new room that includes a control pad.
Pressing the buttons on these pads will alter where each portal will send them. It is up to your players to figure out the correct sequence of portals and buttons to use to make it out. To help your players, you could have clues scattered around each room that hint towards which color portals they should focus on.
This puzzle could be a great addition to your next side quest, especially if you are playing in a Spelljammer setting, as portals fit well with a science-fiction theme. If you are playing online with friends, you could drop players into different voice calls depending on what portal they went through. This would limit their communication with one another as they attempt to reunite through this maze of portals.
The Play
The play blends together puzzles and role-playing. If one of the player characters was an actor in their backstory, this could be their time to shine. The party finds themselves trapped in a spooky theatre, perhaps after being lured there by the villain. They cannot leave until the correct play is performed. Luckily the theatre is full of props and costumes for the group to use.
Behind the stage, they'll find a storybook torn to shreds. The pages are all muddled up. The party will need to figure out the correct order of the story and then recreate it on the stage. If they get everything right, including the props and costumes, the doors will finally unlock, and they are free. This puzzle is quite a lighthearted, silly one that should be fun for the group to invest in.
The Code
The party has ventured to a distant, mysterious town in search of an ancient tome. Fortunately, they find it, but unfortunately, it appears to be written in a strange code. Even the Comprehended Languages spell cannot decipher what is being said here. Etched on a wall nearby is a grid full of the same symbols that can help to solve the cipher.
If your players struggle to crack the code, you could provide a more social solution to the puzzle. An example of this would be to have the group eavesdrop on two strangers having a conversation. They are speaking in the same code from the book. The party will need to look out for context clues to help them understand the code.
The Never-Ending Road / Staircase
The never-ending road or staircase are perfect DnD 5E puzzles for a scary campaign you are running. Your party could be investigating a haunted castle or just traveling down a long, winding road, when they realize that a lot of time has passed and they have yet to reach their destination. Make sure to have some distinct landmarks, such as a statue on the road or a portrait on the wall. Those paying attention will realize you've already described these landmarks, and that the party is stuck in a loop. Even if the party splits up and heads in different directions, they will still bump into one another.
There could be many solutions to this alarming puzzle. Perhaps they need to find a map that will show them a secret route out. Maybe they need to walk a certain way, or take a set number of steps. Perhaps there is a quiet tune they can hear in the distance, and they will only be able to leave if they repeat the melody themselves. You can get quite creative with this idea, and if you really want to mess with the group, drag out the puzzle for as long as you like.
The Fox, The Chicken, And The Bag Of Grain
The fox, the chicken, and the bag of grain is a classic puzzle that has been around for quite some time. The idea is that you must cross a river, but you only have enough space on your boat to take one other thing with you. You need to get a fox, a chicken, and a bag of grain across. The catch is that you can't leave the chicken with the grain, or it will eat it. Likewise, you can't leave the fox with the chicken, as that would be too dangerous.
This puzzle could be easily adapted to fit into the world of Dungeons & Dragonsif you replace the three things with monsters and magical items. It is a fun, physical puzzle for your players to figure out. If you feel it is too easy, you could add additional elements that the party needs to keep track of. Perhaps you could even add a time limit to really build up the tension of this task.
The Miniature Town
Your party is visiting a mysterious town that appears to change its layout each day. When attempting to uncover the truth about what is happening, they stumble upon a table with a miniature version of the town laid out before them. If a player picks up a building or moves something in this tiny town, it also affects the real town too. This can be quite an exciting puzzle for your players as they try to return the town to normal.
It could be a case that one of your players has been separated from the group and discovers this strange miniature version of the place they know their friends are trapped in. If you are playing online, on a site such as Roll20, you could have that separated player be allowed to see the entire map and even be able to move objects to create new pathways for the party. Meanwhile, the rest of the party has to trust them, hoping that they will help them avoid dangers and threats within the actual town.
A Troubled Ghost
A mysterious, ghostly figure blocks the path toward the group's next destination. Perhaps it is too tough to fight outright but is speaking in riddles and is too caught up in its own thoughts to communicate with easily. Your party will not move on until they figure out what keeps this troubled ghost around and help it move on to the afterlife.
There could be many solutions to this puzzle. The party might be able to find clues and hints to the ghost's life before its demise scattered around the room. Perhaps the spirit wants to see an NPC one last time or be reunited with a precious heirloom. Once the players have figured out their desire, they can fulfill it, and the now content entity will fade away, leaving behind an item, such as a key, to help the party move on to the next room. This puzzle could also be resolved with an entertaining social encounter if your players want to role-play with the ghost to get some extra clues.
The Moving Maze
The Hedge Maze is a tremendous physical puzzle to challenge your players with. Whether playing in person or online, it is a good idea to have most of the map hidden from the party. The players will need to rely on their memory to recall what the rest of the maze looked like as they sink deeper into its depths. They could start to become cartographers themselves, drawing their own versions of the map to keep track of their progress.
You can lob an extra twist onto this puzzle by having the maze shift and change while they are navigating it. The places they went through before are now different. The solution for reaching the exit could be a variety of things. Perhaps they need to note the different stone pathways that lead to various structures within the maze. Find them all, and the path to the exit will reveal itself.
Alternatively, they might need to keep quiet and listen out for familiar sounds to guide them. There could also be interesting characters to encounter throughout the maze to help lead the party around.