LinkedIn Patches Guide: How to Solve Every Daily Puzzle
Published September 14, 2026
What Patches is asking for
Patches gives you a grid where certain cells carry a clue: a number and a shape badge. Your job is to divide the whole grid into rectangular regions, one region per clue, where the region's area matches its number and the region's shape matches its badge. Every cell in the grid has to belong to exactly one rectangle, and no two rectangles can overlap, so the puzzle is really about tiling the board perfectly using the area and shape constraints as your only guide.
Reading the badges correctly
The shape badge tells you as much as the number does, so don't skip past it. A square badge means the rectangle must have equal width and height. A tall badge means the rectangle is taller than it is wide, and a wide badge means the opposite. An any badge means the shape is unconstrained beyond matching the area, which gives you more flexibility but also more possibilities to check against the surrounding clues. Before sketching anything, note both the number and the badge for every clue on the board — mixing them up is the easiest way to draw a rectangle that looks right at a glance but is actually the wrong shape.
Prime-area clues force straight lines
If a clue's number is a prime number, its rectangle can only be a 1×N strip, since a prime has no factor pairs besides 1 and itself. A clue showing 7 with a wide badge has exactly one possible shape: a single row seven cells long. This is one of the fastest wins in the puzzle — spot the prime-numbered clues first, because their shape is already fully determined before you've drawn a single line, and placing them early removes a long, thin block of cells from consideration for every neighboring region.
Start from the corners
Corner cells only have two possible directions a rectangle can extend from them, compared to interior cells that could belong to a region reaching in from several sides. If a clue sits in or near a corner, figure out its rectangle first — there's far less ambiguity about which cells it claims. Once a corner region is settled, the cells bordering it are effectively half-determined too, since a neighboring region can no longer reach into the space the corner rectangle just filled.
Find cells only one clue can reach
For any empty, unclaimed cell, ask which clues could plausibly extend a rectangle far enough to cover it. Often only one clue is close enough, or only one clue has enough remaining area left to stretch that far — in that case, the cell belongs to that region no matter what the rest of the board ends up looking like. This is especially useful in the middle stretches of solving, once several regions are partly drawn and the open space left over has started to narrow.
Avoid overlapping regions
As you sketch out rectangles, keep a running check that no two regions claim the same cell, and that no cell is left uncovered once every clue's area is used up. A quick way to catch mistakes is to add up all the clue numbers and compare that total to the grid's total cell count — they should match exactly. If your running total of assigned cells doesn't add up as you go, a region is either too big, too small, or overlapping a neighbor, and it's worth rechecking the prime and corner regions first since those are the ones most likely to have been drawn slightly off.
Use the total area as a running check
Before you get deep into sketching rectangles, add up every clue's number across the whole board and compare that sum to the total number of cells in the grid. On a well-formed Patches puzzle, those two numbers always match exactly, since every cell belongs to exactly one clue's region. Beyond confirming you've read every clue correctly, this total is useful mid-solve too: once you've placed several regions, subtract their combined area from the grid total, and you'll know exactly how many cells the remaining, unplaced clues have left to work with. If the remaining clues' numbers don't add up to that leftover figure, you've made an error somewhere in the regions you've already drawn, and it's worth rechecking them before continuing.
A worked example
Picture a 6×6 grid with a clue reading "5, wide" sitting near the top-left corner, and a neighboring clue reading "4, square" one cell to its right. Since 5 is prime, the wide clue can only be a 1×5 strip — a single row five cells long. That immediately tells you which row it occupies and that it can't bend or stack. The square clue, needing equal width and height, can't be 1×4 (that would be wide, not square), so with only whole-number options its area of 4 must form a 2×2 block. Once you place the 1×5 strip along its row, check whether the 2×2 block still has room to fit beside it without overlapping — if the strip's row leaves only one open row above or below within reach of the square clue, the 2×2 block's position becomes fully determined too. Two clues solved, and the cells they don't touch are now the only space left for whatever clues come next.
Keep practicing
Patches rewards clue-reading discipline as much as spatial reasoning — get the shape badges right, knock out the prime-area strips early, and the rest of the grid tends to fall into place. Try the current puzzle with our Patches solver, or play it on the daily Patches page. For the full set of daily puzzles, see today's LinkedIn games answers.