As I was cruising in the Caribbean (posts about that coming soon!), playing my daily puzzles like Wordle and Zip, I noticed that LinkedIn was suggesting a new puzzle: Patches. How new? Yesterday’s puzzle was numbered 16; I have a 14-day streak playing it.
Like Zip, Patches is a spatial awareness game, trying to fill the entirety of a grid. Instead of numbers to connect, there are blocks, some with specific numbers or shapes that they must match. In the first image of the slideshow, there’s a gold 9 in the upper left corner with crossing rectangles, with no other blocks in the 3 by 4 squares below and to the right of it; the placement for that one seemed obvious at a 3 by 3 square. But in the bottom left, one space to the right of the edge, there’s a blue block with a 2 shaped as a wide rectangle; that could go either direction, depending on what other blocks fill. And the bottom right has a red block with crossing rectangles without a number; that means it can go any direction, any number. Any direction does still mean rectangular; you can’t drag one block to form just a corner.
The second puzzle in the slideshow has a whopping ten blocks to place, still in a 6 by 6 grid. Is that easier or harder?