Maya Chen
About Maya
Maya Chen is the senior puzzle editor at GameAnswers.com, where she runs the daily-puzzle desk — Wordle, Connections, Strands, Spelling Bee, the Mini Crossword, and the rest of the NYT daily lineup. She joined GameAnswers.com full-time in 2024 after five years contributing to Polygon, Kotaku, and Eurogamer, where she wrote about word games, puzzle culture, and the casual-mobile boom that followed the 2022 Wordle moment.
Maya holds a BA in Linguistics from the University of Edinburgh and spent her postgraduate year researching cryptic-crossword cluing conventions. Her academic background shapes the way she covers puzzles — she pays attention to word frequency, etymology, and how editors choose solutions, not just to today's hint.
How Maya works
Every Wordle, Connections, and Strands guide on this site is hand-checked by Maya against the live puzzle on the morning it releases. We do not auto-publish answers from a scraper before a human has confirmed them — if something looks wrong on the page, the buck stops with Maya.
For each puzzle, the workflow is the same: solve it without hints, double-check the result against the official NYT solution, write the hint ladder so each hint reveals strictly less than the next, and only then write the full-answer page that lives behind a one-click reveal. The intent is always that you can grab a single nudge without spoiling the puzzle you came here to solve.
Maya also maintains the strategy and history sections on each game hub. The Wordle hub goes into the most depth — if you want to know why CRANE is a better opener than ADIEU, that's where to start.
Personal best
Maya's all-time longest Wordle streak is 312 consecutive days. Her favourite Wordle moment is solving SLOSH in two guesses in February 2023; her least favourite is missing PARER in six and breaking a 156-day streak. She refuses to play Hard Mode “on principle” but admits she really should.
Outside of work she's a Connections evangelist (“it's the best NYT Game and I will not be taking questions”), occasionally still plays cryptic crosswords on paper, and is responsible for the Spelling Bee section featured in our weekly digest.
Editorial policy & contact
If you spot an error in any answer on the site, email Maya directly at [email protected] — corrections are typically pushed within the hour. Tips and game suggestions are also welcome at the same address.
GameAnswers.com is editorially independent and not affiliated with the New York Times, Spotify, or any of the publishers whose games we cover. Game titles and trademarks belong to their respective owners; we publish fan-made answer guides under nominative fair use.