How to play Patches
Patches is a spatial logic puzzle on a six by six grid. A handful of squares carry a clue, and your job is to cut the whole grid into rectangles. Three rules decide where the cuts go:
- Every square ends up inside exactly one rectangle. Nothing is left over and nothing is covered twice.
- Every rectangle holds exactly one clue.
- Each rectangle must match what its clue says.
A clue can name a size, a shape, or both. A number is the exact count of squares. Square means as wide as it is tall, wide means wider than tall, and tall means taller than wide. A clue marked any takes any rectangle at all, and only tells you that a patch lives there.
Drag across the grid to draw a rectangle, and tap one you have drawn to take it off again. Puzzle fans will know the format as Shikaku, with the shape clues added on top.
Tips for beginners
- Start with the awkward numbers. A clue of 5 or 7 can only be a 1 by 5 or 1 by 7 strip, so it has very few places to go. Prime numbers are the best opening move on any board.
- Corners are cheap. A clue near a corner has most of its rectangles cut off by the edge of the grid.
- Work from the squares, not just the clues. If only one rectangle can still reach a particular square, that rectangle is settled, whichever clue it belongs to.
- Shape clues cut hard. Square plus a number fixes the rectangle completely, and tall or wide halves the options even without a number.
- Never guess. Every board here is checked so it can be finished by logic alone. If you are stuck, there is a clue whose rectangle is already decided.
Where Patches comes from
Patches comes from Japan's great puzzle magazine, and from a puzzle about cutting a grid into pieces.
- 1989 Shikaku Yoshinao Anpuku, a maths student at Kyoto University, invents Shikaku, and the puzzle magazine Nikoli publishes it.
- Since A Nikoli classic Shikaku becomes one of Nikoli's signature puzzles and spreads to books, newspapers and video games.
- Today Patches The same cut-it-into-rectangles idea, with clues that also say which way each piece is shaped.
- Also known as
- Shikaku, Divide by Squares
- Puzzle family
- Area division
- Our board
- 6 by 6, rectangles
- What it trains
- Spatial reasoning and quick sums
Did you know? Shikaku means "divide into squares" in Japanese, even though most of the pieces turn out to be rectangles.
Is this the same as LinkedIn's puzzle?
No. This is our own Patches, in the same divide the grid style. Every board is generated here and checked two ways: that there is exactly one way to divide it, and that the division can be found without guessing. The answers will not match any official daily answer. It is free, needs no account, and your streak is saved in your own browser.