How to play Patches — a free, no-sign-up shape-fill logic puzzle

Patches takes the quietly addictive idea behind jigsaw and tiling puzzles and distils it to a single, pure question: can you make this exact set of shapes fill this exact space? Each puzzle hands you a board — a connected patch of cells — and a tray of small coloured pieces. Every piece has to go down, and when they are all placed the board must be covered perfectly. It is deduction, not dexterity: there is no timer bearing down on you and nothing to react to, just a small logical space you tidy into place.

There is a new board every day, shared by everyone, so you can compare notes with friends. When the daily puzzle is done, an unlimited practice mode generates fresh, solvable boards whenever you want more, and a dated archive lets you replay puzzles you missed. Practice rounds never touch your daily streak, so you can experiment freely.

Three things set the tone. First, it is free — there is no paywall and no premium upsell. Second, it asks for no account: your streak and statistics live in your own browser, so you can start the moment the page loads without handing over an email address. Third, the interface is quiet — type-set pieces, a tidy status read-out, a plain-text share, and zero emoji anywhere in the experience.

It is also built to be read by everyone. Every piece carries a letter tag and a thick border as well as a colour, so nothing depends on colour alone — a detail that matters for the roughly one in twelve men who are colour-blind. The whole board renders before any script runs, so it works on a slow connection and is fully keyboard-operable.

The goal is to tile the board exactly using every piece in the tray. Tap a piece to pick it up, rotate it if you need to, then tap a board cell to drop it. Keep going until the whole board is covered. A few rules govern how the pieces behave:

The board is a fixed region. It is a connected group of cells — sometimes a rectangle, often an irregular shape with corners and narrow arms. You must cover all of it, and only it.

The pieces are polyominoes. Each piece is a small connected group of squares: a tromino (three squares), a tetromino (four) or a pentomino (five), in shapes like straight bars, L-bends, T-junctions and squares.

You must tile exactly. Place every piece so the board is covered with no gaps, no overlaps and nothing hanging over the edge. The combined area of the pieces always equals the area of the board, so a perfect fit is possible.

Rotate, but never flip. A piece can be turned in ninety-degree steps, but it cannot be mirrored. A shape and its mirror image are different pieces, so an S-shaped piece can never be flipped into a Z — you rotate it in place until it fits.

Three cues, never colour alone. Above are three pieces as the tray draws them — an L-tromino (A), a square tetromino (B) and a U-pentomino (C). Each shows a colour, a letter tag and a thick border around its edge, so you can always tell the pieces apart and see exactly where each one begins and ends.

How a placement lands. When you drop a piece, its top-left square lands on the cell you tapped. If any square would fall outside the board, the placement is refused; if it would sit on top of another piece, the overlap is flagged in the running tally so you can pick a piece back up and try again. Tapping a placed piece lifts it straight back into your hand.

Winning. You win the instant every piece is placed and every board cell is covered exactly once. That completed arrangement is called a tiling. Note that a board can sometimes be tiled in more than one valid way — your goal is any exact tiling that covers the board once, not one particular picture, so a solve that differs from the published answer is still a win.

The fastest way into any Patches board is to hunt for a cell that has almost no room to breathe. Imagine a small L-shaped board of seven cells: a full top row four squares wide, with a two-square shelf below its left end and one square below that again. Your tray holds two pieces — a straight tetromino (four squares in a line) and an L-tromino (three squares bent at a right angle).

Look first at the top-right square. It is a dead end: the only board cell touching it is the square immediately to its left. Whatever piece covers it therefore has to run left along the top row. The L-tromino cannot do that — it bends, and there is nothing below the top row on the right for it to bend into. Only a straight piece running the length of the row fits, and the one straight piece you own is the tetromino. So the tetromino is forced: it fills the entire top row.

With the top row gone, the remaining three squares — the two-square shelf and the single square below it — form a neat right-angle. That is exactly the footprint of the L-tromino, and only one rotation drops it in cleanly. Place it and the board is covered: two pieces, no gaps, no overlaps. The whole solve flowed from a single observation — find the tightest cell, let it dictate the piece that must go there, and the rest falls out around it. That habit, applied corner by corner, is the heart of Patches, and it is the thread we pull on in the strategy guide.

Fitting polyominoes into a region is an old and much-loved idea, from wooden pentomino sets to the exact-cover puzzles that computer-science students meet in class. Patches sits squarely in that family. Our game and answer pages describe it as a LinkedIn-style logic puzzle, because it belongs to the same wave of quick daily shape-fill puzzles — but Patches is an independent implementation with our own original code, from the board generator to the built-in solver. The table below places it against the wider category of shape-fit puzzles you may have played.

The differences that matter most in daily play are the quiet ones: Patches is free with unlimited practice, needs no account, and puts a letter tag and a thick border on every piece so the board is legible without depending on colour. There is no “come back tomorrow” wall and nothing to unlock with a subscription.