Maya Brennan

Maya spent four years at a Boston tutoring chain teaching middle-school math and SAT prep before going freelance in late 2022. She started a personal blog about puzzle games to procrastinate on grading homework, picked up a small readership, and now writes here as her main job. She still tutors two evenings a week because, as she puts it, watching a kid actually get a logic problem keeps her honest about which puzzle mechanics are clever and which ones are just gatekeeping.

Her tutoring background shows up in the reviews. She thinks about how a game introduces its rules and whether it scaffolds difficulty the way a good lesson plan would. She is also the reason this site does not run "5 stars or skip it" thinkpieces: anyone who has tried to explain function composition to a tired 14-year-old knows that "this is fine, it does what it says" is a real and useful verdict.

Maya covers most of our puzzle reviews and runs the entire .io section because both formats reward patient thinking, which suits her. She writes one or two pieces a month for the blog, usually on technical or design topics.