What Is the Patches Game? Rules, Origin & How It Works

Patches is a logic puzzle about cutting a grid into rectangles. You get a square board with a few clue cells on it, and you divide the whole board into rectangular patches so that every patch contains exactly one clue and matches what that clue says about its shape and size. There is no luck, no word knowledge and almost no arithmetic, just geometry and deduction.

Patches in one minute

A board is a square grid: 6×6 to 8×8 for the daily puzzle, and up to 10×10 here. A handful of cells hold clues. Each clue ends up inside exactly one patch, and each patch is a solid rectangle. When you finish, every cell of the board belongs to exactly one patch, with no gaps and no overlaps.

A clue can tell you two things:

A shape. Square means the patch is a square. Wide means it is wider than it is tall, and Tall means it is taller than it is wide. A dashed Freeform clue allows any rectangle.
A number. If there is one, it is the exact number of cells in the patch.

Some clues show both, some show only one, and a blank Freeform clue shows neither. The less a clue tells you, the more you work out from the clues around it.

A real 6×6 Medium board, before and after. Six clues become six patches.

On the board above, the Square 9 in the bottom row and the two Square clues without numbers all turn out to be 3×3 blocks. The Tall 3 is a single column three cells high, the Square 4 in the top-right corner is a 2×2, and the Wide clue with no number fills the last two cells.

Why it is a logic puzzle, not a drawing game

Every board has exactly one solution, and you can reach it without guessing. On this site a built-in solver checks each board by solving it the way a person would, one forced step at a time, and a board is only used if that works. So every move you make can be justified: this clue has only one rectangle that fits, that cell can only be reached by one clue, this region has exactly enough room.

That is what makes Patches satisfying. The first moves come from clues that leave no choice, and each patch you place becomes a wall that narrows the options around it, until the last patches drop into place. Our Patches tips & strategy page walks through two real boards step by step.

Where the format comes from

Patches belongs to a family of grid-division puzzles. Its closest relative is Shikaku, a Japanese pencil puzzle published by Nikoli, where every clue is a number and each number is the area of its rectangle. Patches keeps Shikaku's core rule, one clue per rectangle and every cell covered, and adds shape clues. Because a clue can name a shape without a size, or a size without a shape, you reason about proportions as well as area, and a small 6×6 board still has plenty to think about. The full comparison, including which techniques carry over, is on Patches vs. Shikaku.

Patches Game is an independent site with its own boards: a daily puzzle, an archive, Unlimited Mode and an 800-board catalog, all playable with no account and no daily limit. New to the rules? Start with how to play Patches.

How Patches works on this site

A daily puzzle. One board a day, the same for everyone. Starting November 10, 2026, the daily puzzle changes every day at 5 am Eastern Time, the same moment for every Coffee Break game. It ramps up through the week: a 6×6 Medium on Monday and Tuesday, a 7×7 Medium on Wednesday and Thursday, an 8×8 Medium on Friday, then a 7×7 Hard on Saturday and an 8×8 Hard on Sunday. Every daily since April 2026 is in the archive.
Four sizes, four difficulties. 6×6, 7×7, 8×8 and 10×10 in Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert in Unlimited Mode, or Easy to Hard in the catalog of 800 curated boards.
Difficulty by reasoning. Easy boards open with several patches that place straight away. Medium boards need a few deductions. Hard boards give you fewer starting moves, longer chains and more clues with no number. Expert boards take the most deductions of all.
A timed mode. Beat the Clock starts you with one minute and banks extra time for every board you solve.
Help when you want it. Undo, Reset, and a Hint button that works in steps, from pointing at the next clue to placing its patch for you.

Patches compared with other daily logic puzzles

If you already play a daily logic puzzle, here is how Patches relates to the ones you are most likely to know.

Patches compared with Shikaku, Queens, Tango, Zip and sudoku
Puzzle	What you do	What the clues tell you	The key skill
Patches	Divide the grid into rectangles, one clue in each	A shape (Square, Wide, Tall or Freeform), a number of cells, both, or neither	Working out a patch’s size and proportions from the space around its clue
Shikaku	Divide the grid into rectangles, one clue in each	Always a number: the rectangle’s area	Choosing between the rectangles with that area, such as 6×1, 3×2, 2×3 or 1×6
Queens	Place one queen in every row, column and color region	The colored regions; no two queens may touch, even diagonally	Tracking where each region’s queen can still go
Tango	Fill every cell with a sun or a moon	Given symbols and = or × signs between neighbors; no more than two alike in a line, equal counts in every row and column	Applying pattern and balance rules
Zip	Draw one path through every cell	Numbered stops to visit in order, and walls the path cannot cross	Planning a route that leaves no cell stranded
Sudoku	Fill the grid with digits	Given digits; each row, column and box holds each digit once	Elimination by row, column and box

Patches sits closest to Shikaku, and it shares the coverage idea with Zip: in both, every cell has to be used. What sets it apart from all of them is that the unknown is a shape. You are not choosing a symbol or a digit for each cell; you are deciding where the boundaries go.

Who Patches is for

Patches suits anyone who enjoys spatial reasoning more than words or numbers. A 6×6 takes well under a minute once you know the rules, which makes it an easy daily habit, and the bigger boards give longer sessions when you want them. Beginners can start on Easy, where every clue states its shape and size, and move up as the deductions become familiar.

How to start

Read how to play Patches for the rules, a worked example and a practice board. Then try today's puzzle, and pick up technique from Patches tips & strategy. Other questions are answered in the Patches FAQ.

Frequently asked questions

What is the Patches game?

A logic puzzle where you divide a square grid into rectangles. Every rectangle contains exactly one clue and matches that clue’s shape (Square, Wide, Tall or Freeform) and, if one is shown, its number of cells. Every cell must be covered exactly once.

Is Patches the same as Shikaku?

No, but they are close relatives. Both divide a grid into rectangles with one clue each. Shikaku clues are always area numbers, while Patches clues can also name a shape and can leave the number out, which adds a second kind of reasoning.

Who makes the puzzles on this site?

Patches Game is an independent site with its own puzzles, built and checked by its own generator and solver. You can play for free with no account and no daily limit.

Is Patches hard?

It scales. An Easy 6×6, where several patches place straight away, teaches the rules, and most signed-in players here finish one in under a minute. Hard boards, with fewer starting moves and more missing numbers, and the bigger grids take longer. The daily puzzle is never Easy: Medium from Monday to Friday and Hard at the weekend.

Do you need to be good at math to play Patches?

No. The only arithmetic is small multiplication, like knowing that an 8-cell patch could be 4×2, 2×4, 8×1 or 1×8. Everything else is spatial reasoning: what fits where.

Where can I play Patches for free?

Right here. Patches Game has a free daily puzzle, an archive of past dailies, Unlimited Mode in four sizes and four difficulties, a catalog of 800 boards and Beat the Clock, all in the browser with nothing to download.

What Is Patches?