Patches Unlimited: 400 Free Rectangle Puzzles, No Daily Cap

Most searches for "Patches unlimited" come from the same place: you've solved LinkedIn's Patches for the day, it took four minutes, and now there is nothing left to draw rectangles on until tomorrow. So the short answer first — Grid Leveling has 400 Patches levels you can play right now, free, in the browser, with no account and nothing that runs out. The rest of this article is about what is actually in those 400 boards and how to use them so the practice shows up in your daily time.

What "Unlimited" Means Here

• 400 generated-and-verified levels across four grid sizes, unlocked by playing — one solved board opens the next.
• A separate daily Patches puzzle on top of that: the same board for every player, every day.
• No lives, no timer that punishes you, no energy meter. A half-drawn grid waits as long as you do.
• No sign-up and no install. Your progress lives in your own browser, not on our server.
• Undo and a hint on every board, so a wrong rectangle costs a tap rather than a restart.
• Replay anything. Finished levels stay open, so a board you liked is always there again.

The one thing that is not unlimited is randomness. Every board is generated in advance and checked by a solver so that it has exactly one solution. A grid of random clues would give you infinite puzzles and no promise that any of them close — and in a partition puzzle a board that almost closes is worse than no board at all, because you cannot tell whether you are wrong or it is. Finite and fair beats infinite and broken.

The 400 Levels, by Grid Size

Each tier is exactly one grid size, so moving up is a real step rather than a label. Clue counts and the mix of shape badges scale with the board:

• Easy — 5×5 grids, 100 levels, 3 to 11 clues. Most badges are exact (Square, Wide or Tall), so the puzzle is mainly about reading the badge correctly. 1–2 minutes each.
• Medium — 6×6 grids, 100 levels, 5 to 15 clues. The first size where two clues regularly compete for the same cells. 2–4 minutes.
• Hard — 7×7 grids, 100 levels, 5 to 20 clues. Any-shape badges start to carry the difficulty; a single 12 with no badge can have four legal orientations. 4–7 minutes.
• Expert — 8×8 grids, 100 levels, 6 to 24 clues. Most badges are Any, which is effectively classic Shikaku with the odd hint. 7–12 minutes.

Two generator rules are worth knowing because they change how you solve. First, there are no 1×1 clues — every rectangle covers at least two cells — so a lone unclaimed cell at the end always belongs to a neighbour, never to itself. Second, the board size is fixed per tier, which means the corner-and-edge logic you learn on 5×5 transfers unchanged to 8×8; only the number of decisions grows.

How This Differs From LinkedIn's Patches

Same core rules: divide the grid into rectangles, one clue per rectangle, area equal to the number, shape matching the badge. The difference is supply. LinkedIn publishes one Patches board a day with no replay and no archive of practice levels — which is exactly why "unlimited" is the word people reach for. Here you get 400 levels in four tiers and a daily on top, and the two are kept separate: the daily pulls from its own mixed pool of Easy, Medium and Hard boards, so it never repeats something you just cleared in a tier. Grid Leveling is an independent site and is not affiliated with LinkedIn; if you want the official daily, it lives in the LinkedIn app.

How to Practise So It Actually Makes You Faster

Four hundred boards only help if you are not sleepwalking through them. Three habits separate players whose daily time drops from players who simply play a lot:

• Move up a tier when you can clear three boards in a row without using Undo — not when you are bored. A solve that needed backtracking was a guess that happened to work, and the next grid size punishes guessing harder.
• Use Easy to drill badge reading until it is automatic. A Wide 6 is 3×2 or 6×1 and never 2×3; a Square 4 is one shape only. On 5×5 a misread badge contradicts itself within a move, which is the fastest possible feedback while the habit forms.
• On Hard and Expert, place nothing until you have found the clue with exactly one legal rectangle. There is always at least one — a corner clue, a big Square, a Tall clue jammed against the bottom wall — and starting anywhere else means a plausible-but-wrong rectangle can survive five more placements before the grid refuses to close.

The tactics themselves — Square badges first, corners and edges, biggest clues before smallest, counting the cells left in a pocket — are covered properly in the Patches strategy guide. If you are brand new, the rules page takes a minute, and What Is Patches? explains where the game comes from.

Where the Daily Puzzle Fits

Treat the daily Patches as the fixed point in your week rather than the practice itself. It is one board for everyone that day, it rolls over at midnight India time so the whole world works on the same grid at once, and it is drawn from a mixed pool of Easy, Medium and Hard levels — so some days are a warm-up and some days are not. That is the point: it is the one board you do not get to pick the difficulty of, which makes it an honest read on where you actually are. Solve it every day and the streak counter keeps score.

Playing on a Phone

Patches is a drag-to-draw game, so it plays at least as well with a thumb as with a mouse — most of our players are on mobile. You can add Grid Leveling to your home screen straight from the browser and it opens fullscreen like an app, with no app store and nothing to download. Pages you have already opened stay playable if your signal drops, which covers the commute that a four-minute rectangle puzzle was made for.

That is the whole offer: 400 free Patches levels, one new daily board, and no cap on either. If you want the same kind of grid deduction with a different rule set, Queens is the closest thing we make, and Wend has its own unlimited practice levels too.