Rigging a low poly beard to animate with physics

Hey guys,

I've been creating a very low poly character for a game some friends and I are making. One of the main things we are trying to accomplish with the main character, is a long, flowy, cartoony beard that moves with physics whenever he moves.

I cannot figure out how to rig that in Blender, so that when animated and pulled into Unity, the beard will flow dynamically with the character and obey physics. Right now, they're the same mesh. Do I have to detach them and do all of that stuff in Unity? Here is the current character mockup:

 

I did something similar with a noodle that moved around dynamically. What i did was make a armature of bones in a chain in unity and painted the weights how i wanted. Then exported it out as an .fbx with only mesh and armature selected. In Unity i attached a rigidbody to each bone and then a character joint pointing to the rigidbody of the previous bone. In your case the top bone in the beard would have a character joint pointing to the main rigidbody of your character so that it would move with it.

In short make it a separate mesh, rig it with a bone chain in Blender, Export to unity, attach rigidbodies and joints.

Not sure how efficient this is and may take alot of tweaking, but hope it sets you on the right track.