Patches Answer Today (October 19, 2026)

What Patches asks you to do

Patches is a tiling puzzle. The board is a square grid — 6×6, 7×7 or 8×8 in the 37 boards we stored between 3 September and 10 October 2026 — with clue cells scattered across it. Your job is to cover the entire board with rectangles, called patches, so that every patch contains exactly one clue cell and no two patches overlap or leave a gap. A clue can show a number, which is the patch's area in cells; a shape icon — wide, tall, square or freeform — which restricts the rectangle's proportions; both; or neither. Because every cell must be covered, the areas of all the patches add up to the number of cells on the board, which is what makes counting so useful.

LinkedIn launched it on 18 March 2026 — Wend followed in June — and, like the other LinkedIn games, it publishes one puzzle per day at midnight Pacific with a consecutive number. Its core rule closely resembles the Japanese puzzle Shikaku, where numbered rectangles tile a grid; LinkedIn adds the shape icons and allows clues with no number. The colours on the board are a display aid: each patch is drawn in its clue's colour so the tiling reads at a glance, but LinkedIn's rules don't use colour as a constraint.

The two ideas that solve most boards

The first is factoring. A clue's number tells you the patch's area, and a rectangle of area 4 is 1×4, 2×2 or 4×1; of area 6 it is 1×6, 2×3, 3×2 or 6×1; of area 7 it is only 1×7 or 7×1, and of area 5 only 1×5 or 5×1. Prime areas are gifts — a 5 or a 7 can only be a straight line — and the shape icon narrows further: a "square" 4 is 2×2 and nothing else. For each clue, list the rectangles its number allows, then strike out any that would run off the board or cover another clue. Clues without a number can't be factored, so leave them until the numbered patches around them are fixed.

The second is the cell nobody else can reach. Look at any empty cell, especially in the corners and along the edges, and ask which clues could possibly have a rectangle covering it. A cell that only one clue can reach belongs to that clue's patch, which fixes part of the rectangle's position and often its whole shape. Corners are where this bites hardest, because a corner cell has to be inside some patch, and only clues within reach of it in a straight rectangle can supply one. Alternate between the two ideas — factor a clue, place what is forced, find a cell only one clue can reach, place that — and the board tiles itself from the outside in.

Reading the answer list

Each line of the list under the board names one patch by its colour, gives its area, its dimensions as rows × columns, and the rows and columns it covers. The list is the finished tiling, not a solving order. Ways to use it:

• To check one patch without spoiling the rest, find the line whose rows and columns include the clue you're stuck on, and read only that line.
• A patch listed as 1×n or n×1 is a straight line — if you had it the other way round, that's usually the error that blocked the rest of your board.
• Shape icons on the board tell you which dimension is longer: on a tall clue the rows figure is the bigger one, on a wide clue the columns figure.
• Clues with no number on the board still get an area in the list, so you can see how the board's leftover cells were shared out.

On guessing

A guess that happens to work teaches nothing, and on a board with one published answer, a careful reading of the clues is enough.

Place a patch only when you can say which cell forced it. If you cannot, look for a cell that only one clue can reach.— HintSheet's working rule for Patches

Sources, and where to go from here

The board is captured from the puzzle's structured data after the midnight-Pacific reset — clue positions, colours, shape icons and the solved patches — and drawn from that data; see the editorial policy page. On 11 October 2026 we re-checked every stored board from 3 September onwards: in each one the number of patches equals the number of clues. The Patches hub has the rules and worked examples, including a real board solved step by step, and the archive holds every past board, which is the practice set. The related LinkedIn logic games each have a daily page in the same shape: Queens, Tango, Zip and Mini Sudoku.

Areas and the rectangles they allow

The factoring step in a table. Areas from 2 to 16 cells appear in our stored boards (3 September–10 October 2026); the commonest are 4 (88 patches), 6 (67), 2 (64) and 3 (59). Shape icons remove options from the middle column.

Corners and edges, worked

A corner cell has to be inside some patch, and a patch is a rectangle, so the clue that supplies it must lie in the same row or column as the corner, or at a diagonal offset small enough that a rectangle from the clue can reach the corner without exceeding its area. On a board with a clue of 3 two cells along the top edge from the corner, the corner is reachable by that clue only if its patch is a 1×3 running along the edge into the corner — and if no other clue can reach the corner at all, that is the patch, placed, done. The same reasoning runs along every edge: an edge cell reachable by one clue fixes that clue's patch to include it, and often fixes its orientation, because a rectangle that must reach an edge cell from a clue two rows away has to be at least three tall.

Practise this on the archived boards by covering the solution and, before placing anything, marking each corner with the clues that could reach it. A corner with a single candidate is the cleanest possible start. The Patches hub walks through a real Monday board the same way.

How it plays compared with Shikaku

Players who know Shikaku will recognise the core move — factor the number, place the rectangle — but two things differ. Patches adds shape icons, which remove the long-thin-versus-square ambiguity for any clue that carries one, and it allows clues with no number at all, which Shikaku does not: 127 of the 361 clues in our archive had none. The boards are also small, 6×6 to 8×8 in our window, and LinkedIn's launch post describes Patches as "a fast, satisfying challenge that fits perfectly into a busy day".

When a patch will not fit

Each board has one published answer, so a patch that will not fit means an earlier patch is wrong, not that this one is. The usual culprit is a flexible area — a 6 placed as 2×3 when it needed to be 3×2 — placed before the corner or edge reasoning fixed its orientation. When you are stuck, remove the most recently placed flexible patch rather than the one that will not fit, and re-check its orientation against the edge cells it was meant to reach. LinkedIn's Hint button, per its Help page, highlights a cell or region and shows the next step.

Frequently asked questions

Recent Patches answers

Every past puzzle is in the Patches archive. New here? Start with the Patches guide.