I DM for a group of 5 players. Two, are die hard hack n slashers. They don't get puzzles, but will usually make an attempt. The third guy enjoys the puzzles, but is usually overshadowed by my puzzle lovers. I won't deny it, every puzzle I've thrown at these guys has been solved in under 5 minutes, except for one.
With a puzzle, if applicable, I will have multiple copies of handouts and even better, physical objects to interact with.
Some examples:
I found a neat little geometric puzzle online that is hard for a 2nd grader to put back into a square. I took 4 of them, mixed the pieces up and had a much larger square. To make it more interesting, I drew it out and cut it out on my bandsaw, so they had all the pieces to play with. They were reassembling a control panel.
I once tied 2 of them together. Take a 2-3 foot section of rope and connect one players wrists together with it, leaving plenty of slack in the middle. Take the second rope and tie it to the wrist of player 2. Now run it between the first rope and player, and then tie the other end of the second rope to player 2's other wrist. If they step back, it should resemble an 8. It is possible to separate yourselves without untying the rope. This was very amusing to watch.
I've also done the filling the room with water, solve a lock type puzzle and some other ones like that.
This one I just ran last session and was a huge hit as it had something for everyone. I actually took a picture, which I'll post here. It was a 6 by 6 grid with a couple walls in it. The players had to place 8 marbles on it, none of them adjacent or able to "see" each other vertically or horizontally. To complicate matters, there were a pair of beholders(I made them medium sized), there to annoy them, and at the start of every turn, each marble(which grew to fill a square when placed on one), had a Burst one force attack.
I also required the players to tell me what they were doing within 10 seconds of their turn starting or they automatically delayed, with the potential to miss their turn entirely. Otherwise, there would have been too much table talk.
Anyway, it was a great encounter as the fighter(one of my hackers) soaked up more damage than I ever imagined he could. The rogue, my other hacker was enlisted to aid the other puzzle solvers since he had a great movement rate.
Everyone really enjoyed it and I hope to use the format again. Mixing the puzzle into combat and putting a time limit on turns really forced them to think on their feet instead of over analyze.
Image link(hopefully it works):
https://docs.google.com/leaf?id=0B9...liMjAtYzViOWViOTg3MTM5&hl=en&authkey=CLnjkfwN
I love puzzles as do my players, but coming up with them is much harder than throwing together an encounter.
For the record, the one that took over an hour was placing 8 queens on a chessboard with none of them able to take each other. In their defense, we started that one around 11:30pm, so they weren't particularly fresh.