Patchwork
Fill a row and it stitches away. Run out of room and the quilt is finished, not lost.
How to Play Patchwork
- Three patches wait below the frame. Drag one onto the quilt, or tap it and then tap the square you want it in.
- Fill a whole row or column and it gets stitched and lifted away, leaving the squares empty again.
- New patches only arrive once all three are used, so the order you spend them in is the whole decision.
- When none of the three will fit anywhere, the quilt is finished: it folds away and a fresh one is laid out. Nothing is lost.
Controls
| Keyboard | None. Click a patch, then click the quilt. |
|---|---|
| Touch | Drag a patch onto the quilt, or tap it and tap where it goes. |
Tips
- Keep a clear lane along one edge. A single straight run is what lets an awkward four-long patch go somewhere.
- A row and a column that cross each other can both be completed by the same patch, which is the largest thing that happens in this game.
- Spending the small patches first feels safe and is usually wrong — they are the ones that fit into whatever gap is left.
About Patchwork
Place felt patches on a quilt frame. Complete a row or column and it is stitched away; when nothing fits any more the quilt folds and a new one begins. It runs directly in your browser with no download or sign-up, on desktop and mobile alike.
Design notes: how Patchwork was built
The genre this borrows from ends when nothing fits, and calls that losing. Here the same moment is the quilt being finished: it folds away, a counter goes up, and a new frame is laid out. That one inversion changes what the whole game is about — you stop playing to survive and start playing to see how much you can stitch before the cloth runs out, which is a question you can walk away from mid-answer.
Tapping to place was added because dragging on a phone means your own hand covers the thing you are aiming at. Both paths run through the same function that draws the preview, so where the ghost appears is where the patch lands — the two can never disagree. Tapping also anchors the patch by its centre rather than its top-left corner and searches one square in each direction for a spot it actually fits, because a finger does not point at a single 45-pixel square.
Boards do not start empty. A blank frame gives you no reason to prefer one square over another, so each new quilt begins with five to eight patches already sewn in, and any row that happens to arrive complete has one square picked out again — otherwise the game would open by playing its own best effect at you before you had done anything.
More of these in the dev notes.
Frequently Asked Questions
What happens when no patch fits?
The quilt is treated as finished rather than failed. It folds away with a sound, the counter in the corner goes up by one, and a fresh frame is laid out with a few patches already sewn in.
Is there a timer or a way to lose?
No. There is no clock, no score that can go down and no failure state, so leaving the tab open and coming back an hour later costs nothing at all.
Can I rotate a patch?
No. Rotation would make almost every patch fit almost everywhere and the decision about where to put it would stop mattering. The shapes arrive as they are.
Does it save?
The number of quilts you have finished is kept in your browser's local storage on that device. The board itself starts fresh each visit, which is the point of a quilt that folds away.
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