What Is Patches? LinkedIn's Rectangle-Partition Puzzle, Explained

Patches is a spatial logic puzzle: the grid is scattered with numbered clues, and your job is to divide the entire board into rectangles so every cell is covered exactly once. Each rectangle must contain exactly one clue, and that clue's number has to equal the rectangle's area - no gaps, no overlaps, no rectangle left holding two clues (or none).

How Patches Works

• Drag across the grid to draw a rectangle. Release to place it.
• Every rectangle must contain exactly one numbered clue, and its area (width times height) must equal that number.
• Each clue also carries a shape badge - Square, Wide, Tall, or Any - that constrains the rectangle's proportions on top of its area.
• The puzzle is solved when every cell belongs to exactly one rectangle and every clue is satisfied.

The Shape Badges

This is the detail that separates Patches from a plain area-tiling puzzle: every clue's badge tells you not just how many cells its rectangle needs, but what shape it has to be. A Square badge means width equals height (a clue of 4 can only be a 2x2 block). A Wide badge means the rectangle is strictly wider than it is tall - a 6 could be a 6x1 strip or a 3x2 block, but never 2x3 or 1x6. Tall is the mirror image, taller than wide. And an Any badge (shown as an asterisk) drops the proportion constraint entirely, leaving only the area to work with - those are the clues that take the most cross-checking against their neighbors.

Where Patches Comes From

Patches is a variant of Shikaku (also called Rectangles), a classic Japanese pencil-and-paper logic puzzle. Standard Shikaku only tells you a rectangle's area and leaves you to work out its exact dimensions from scratch. Patches' shape badges are the added twist - they hand you a head start on proportion, which changes the solving process from 'find any factor pair that fits' to 'find the specific orientation that fits.' It's a small rule addition with a real effect on difficulty and pacing.

Strategy Tips

• Start with heavily constrained clues - a Square badge only has one possible rectangle shape for its area, so it's the fastest to lock in.
• Work the edges and corners first. A clue near a wall has fewer legal placements simply because the board runs out of room in one direction.
• Place the largest clues before the smallest ones - a big rectangle removes a lot of ambiguity for everything nearby, while a stray 1-cell gap can usually only be filled one way anyway.
• When two clues compete for the same cells, place whichever one has fewer valid placements first - it's the one most likely to be forced.

Patches has four difficulty levels, from a 5x5 grid where every clue's shape is exact up to an 8x8 expert board where most badges are Any, plus a new daily Patches puzzle every day - all free to play online, unlike LinkedIn's version which only gives you one puzzle per day with no replay.