About Men El Ghashim

Men El Ghashim (مين الغشيم) is a free social-deduction party game built around one simple idea: everyone at the table knows the secret word except one hidden spy. Players trade short, careful hints, the spy bluffs to stay hidden, and the group votes on who they think is faking it. It runs on iOS and in any browser today, with Android on the way — offline on a single phone passed around the table, or online in rooms with players in different places — from a group of three to a table of twenty.

The game is built and maintained by an independent developer, published under the name gor3a — no studio, no publisher, no marketing team behind it. It started from a familiar problem: the best-known games in this genre, Spyfall and The Chameleon among them, are built English-first, so playing them with an Egyptian or Arabic-speaking group usually means translating jokes and hints on the fly, or losing them entirely. Men El Ghashim was built the other way around — Arabic and Egyptian culture as a starting point, not a translation bolted on afterward.

That shows up directly in the word packs. Alongside everyday categories — Animals, Foods, Places, Professions, general Movies — there are packs built specifically for an Egyptian table: Egyptian Movies and Egyptian Series, drawing on films and drama a Cairo living room grew up on. A hint about Ahmed Zaki or El-Kebir Awi lands completely differently for a group that actually watched it than for one reading it cold off a translated card — and that gap is the point: a spy who didn't grow up on the same shows gets caught faster, which makes the whole game sharper.

The other design choice was refusing to force players to pick between offline and online. Most social-deduction apps assume everyone has their own phone and a stable connection; Men El Ghashim also ships a full offline pass-and-play mode that runs an entire round on one phone with no internet at all, because plenty of real game nights happen with patchy wifi or half the group with no data. Online rooms exist for when a group is spread across different places, but they are the addition, not the requirement — nine packs, full right-to-left Arabic support, and English for everyone else, all free.

Men El Ghashim is actively developed: packs, rules, and the online mode all get adjusted based on what actual games surface. If something breaks, a pack needs a word fixed, or a round just went well and you want to say so, reach out anytime at [email protected].