Case File #0059

Aug 19, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Mercury has almost no atmosphere, so its surface temperature swings dramatically between day and night.

      TRUE. Without air to trap heat, the surface bakes in daylight and plunges far below freezing after dark.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Mercury, being the closest planet to the Sun, is therefore the hottest planet in the solar system.

      FALSE. Venus is hotter; Mercury has almost no atmosphere to hold heat, so its night side turns freezing cold.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Mercury spins three times on its axis for every two orbits it completes around the Sun.

      TRUE. This unusual 3-to-2 spin-orbit lock means a solar day on Mercury lasts two of its years.

  2. Round 2 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Korean writing system Hangul was created in the fifteenth century and designed so that consonant shapes echo the position of the mouth and tongue.

      TRUE. Hangul was purpose-built, and several letter forms sketch how the speech organs make the sound.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Japanese writing system combines more than one script, including kanji characters that were originally borrowed from Chinese.

      TRUE. Modern Japanese mixes kanji with the kana syllabaries hiragana and katakana.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'emoji' comes from blending the English words 'emotion' and 'icon', reflecting the little symbols' Silicon Valley origins.

      FALSE. 'Emoji' is Japanese, from 'e' (picture) and 'moji' (character); its resemblance to 'emotion' is a coincidence, and the pictographs originated in Japan.

  3. Round 3 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A flame's color hints at its temperature, with blue flames generally hotter than orange or yellow ones.

      TRUE. Bluer flames indicate more complete, hotter combustion than yellow-orange ones.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Water extinguishes fire mainly by being heavier than the flames and physically pushing them downward.

      FALSE. Water works by cooling the fuel below ignition and by steam crowding out oxygen, not by weight.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Fire needs three things at once: oxygen, fuel, and heat, and removing any one will put it out.

      TRUE. This is the fire triangle; take away any side and combustion stops.

  4. Round 4 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Bamboo flowers and produces seeds every single year, just like most common garden plants.

      FALSE. Many bamboo species flower only once every several decades, sometimes in synchronised events across entire regions.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Some bamboo species can grow nearly a metre in a single day, making them among the fastest-growing plants on Earth.

      TRUE. Certain species set growth records of close to a metre per day under ideal conditions.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Bamboo is technically a grass, closely related to wheat, rice and lawn grasses.

      TRUE. Despite its woody, tree-like size, bamboo belongs to the grass family Poaceae.

  5. Round 5 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Gold is the densest naturally occurring element, heavier than osmium, iridium and platinum.

      FALSE. Osmium and iridium are denser than gold; gold is very dense but not the densest element.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The gold in Earth's crust was likely forged in extreme cosmic events, such as colliding neutron stars, and delivered by ancient asteroid impacts.

      TRUE. Heavy elements like gold form in rare, violent events and were later delivered to the surface.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Gold is so malleable that a single gram can be hammered into a sheet of about one square metre.

      TRUE. Gold's extraordinary ductility allows a gram to be beaten into a remarkably thin, wide foil.

  6. Round 6 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A single rotation of Venus takes longer than one full trip around the Sun, so its day is longer than its year.

      TRUE. Venus spins once every 243 Earth days but orbits the Sun in about 225, so a day outlasts a year.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Venus is the only planet in the solar system that spins in the opposite direction to its orbit around the Sun.

      FALSE. Uranus also rotates in a backwards, tilted-on-its-side fashion, so Venus is not the only one.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, even though Mercury orbits closer to the Sun.

      TRUE. Venus's thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat, pushing surface temperatures above 460 degrees Celsius.

  7. Round 7 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Owls have eyes powerful enough to see clearly in complete, pitch-black darkness.

      FALSE. Owls see very well in low light but, like every eye, still need some light; they cannot see in total darkness.

    • ✓ TRUE

      An owl can rotate its head about 270 degrees, more than three-quarters of a full turn.

      TRUE. Extra neck vertebrae and specially adapted blood vessels let it turn far beyond what a human neck allows.

    • ✓ TRUE

      An owl's eyes are fixed in their sockets, so it must turn its whole head to look around.

      TRUE. Owls cannot roll their eyes side to side, which is why they swivel their heads instead.

  8. Round 8 FOOD
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      White chocolate counts as true chocolate because it contains roasted cocoa solids just like dark chocolate.

      FALSE. White chocolate contains cocoa butter but no cocoa solids, which is why it lacks the brown color and 'chocolatey' taste.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Cacao was consumed as a bitter, often frothy drink in Mesoamerica long before sweetened chocolate existed.

      TRUE. Mesoamerican peoples drank spiced, unsweetened, frothed cacao; sugar-sweetened chocolate came after European contact.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Solid eating chocolate as we know it emerged in the 19th century after ways to work with cocoa butter developed.

      TRUE. Advances in pressing and recombining cocoa butter in the 1800s made moldable eating chocolate possible.

  9. Round 9 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Mariana Trench is so deep that sunlight only reaches its bottom around midday.

      FALSE — no sunlight reaches the bottom at all; light fades out within the first kilometer, and the trench floor lies near 11 km down in total darkness.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The ocean generates a large share of Earth's oxygen, much of it produced by photosynthesizing plankton near the surface.

      TRUE — marine phytoplankton are estimated to produce roughly half of the planet's oxygen.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sound travels several times faster through water than through air.

      TRUE — sound moves about 1,500 m/s in seawater versus about 340 m/s in air, roughly four times faster.

  10. Round 10 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A saguaro cactus can live for more than 150 years and may not grow its first arm until it is several decades old.

      TRUE. These giants are slow-growing and long-lived, branching only after many years.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A cactus stores water by growing a large internal bladder that it fills from its roots like a tank.

      FALSE. Cacti store water throughout their thick, spongy stem tissue rather than in a single bladder-like organ.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A cactus carries out photosynthesis in its thick green stem, while its leaves are reduced to spines.

      TRUE. The spines are modified leaves; the fleshy stem does the photosynthesising.

← All past cases

Baloney — spot the fabricated fact before the timer runs out

Each round is three short statements, two of them true and one invented. Baloney is a free daily game about catching a plausible lie you do not have the knowledge to refute. No account, no install, ten rounds a day.

What the game actually asks you to do

Every UTC day, Baloney deals the same ten rounds to everyone. Each round is three short statements on a single topic, and exactly one of the three is a fabrication written by the people who made the game. You read all three and tap the one you believe is invented. A thirty-second timer runs on each round, and if it expires without a tap the round is scored as a miss — a detective who cannot decide has been fooled.

The moment you tap, the round resolves in place. The invention is stamped FAKE, the other two are stamped TRUE, and all three carry a one-line explanation of the real story, so a round never leaves a false claim sitting in your head without the correction next to it. The fabrication also reports what share of that day's players fell for it.

Ten rounds is a run of at most about five minutes, and usually less, since a round ends the moment you commit. Then you get a score out of ten, a verdict band, and your streak. A perfect ten is "Baloney Immune"; eight or nine is "Certified Skeptic"; six or seven is "Sharp Nose"; four or five is "Occasionally Fooled"; two or three is "Easily Fooled"; zero or one is "Believes Everything". There is nothing to install, no account and no email address.

Why this is not a trivia game

The distinction is the whole point of the format. Trivia asks whether you know a fact. Baloney asks whether you can smell a lie. You are never asked what is true — you are asked to catch what is false — and those turn out to be different muscles. Someone who would fail every general-knowledge quiz can still be an excellent fake-spotter, because nothing in the game requires recall.

That is also why the game is not easier on the subjects you know. A fabricated claim about a topic you are confident in gets less scrutiny than a claim about a topic you know is foreign to you; expertise is exactly the camouflage a good lie hides behind.

The design also closes off the cheapest shortcut. In every round the two true statements are chosen to sound improbable — they are the ones that provoke "that can't be real". So the feeling of disbelief is not evidence. Two of the three statements earn that reaction honestly, and only one deserves it.

What the game refuses to make up

Most daily games show you a number about "other players" and you take it on faith. Baloney's crowd line is built so that it cannot be invented, and you can see the seams if you look for them. The "% got fooled" figure is the real share of that day's finishers who missed that exact fabrication. Until at least twenty people have finished the day, the line is omitted entirely rather than estimated — on a quiet morning you will see nothing where the number would be, which is the correct answer.

The percentile works the same way. When you finish, your score is submitted once to the day's tally, which returns the day's score distribution; "you were sharper than X% of today's detectives" is the share of players who scored at or below you, computed from that distribution. If the tally is unreachable or the crowd is still too small, that sentence is replaced by "You're one of the first on the case today." Your score, your band and your streak are arithmetic in your own browser and never wait on a network call, so a failed request costs you a crowd figure, not your result.

Two smaller honesties are worth stating plainly. Your streak and today's result are stored in your browser's local storage, not on a server, which means they do not follow you to another device and clearing your browsing data clears them. And the once-a-day lock is client-side — best-effort rather than tamper-proof. A determined player can clear storage and replay, and the archive below will answer any past case outright. The game would rather say that than imply a security it does not have.

The case pool, in numbers

The pool currently holds 150 rounds and ten are served per day, so the whole pool cycles every fifteen days — with daily play a round comes back about two weeks later. The topics and their counts: animals 22, geography 21, language 19, science 19, nature 18, space 17, history 17, food 17.

Two things are worth knowing before you play, and both are checkable rather than asserted. The first is that length is not a tell. Across the pool the fabrications average 104 characters and the true statements average 104 as well, and the fake is the longest statement in its round only about a third of the time. The supposedly "too tidy" fabrication is not measurably tidier than the facts it is hiding among.

The second is that position is not a tell. Of the 150 rounds, 52 put the fabrication in the first slot, 50 in the second and 48 in the third — against the roughly 50 apiece you would expect if position were random. The widest gap is four rounds, well inside the wobble a fair coin gives at this sample size, so no slot is worth favouring: tapping the first statement every time is worth what tapping the third is worth, which is what guessing is worth. An earlier version of this page reported a real third-slot bias — 67 rounds out of 150; the statements are no longer served in the order they were written, and that edge is gone.

The archive is what makes numbers like these verifiable instead of promotional. It lists the past month of closed cases, and each one opens fully declassified: which statement was the invention, and the truth of all three.

Practising, and what to practise on

Because past cases declassify, the archive is also the only real training ground. Reading an old case file cold — deciding before you scroll to the answer — beats replaying a round you already know, and it builds a sample bigger than ten rounds a day.

A few habits earn their keep across both.

Questions people ask

Is Baloney free, and do I need an account?
It is free and there is no account. The game is ad-supported, runs in your browser and installs nothing. Your streak and today's result are kept in your own browser, so there is nothing to sign up for and no personal details are asked for.
Are the facts in Baloney real?
Two of the three statements in every round are genuine facts. The third is a fabrication written by the game's authors, and it is always revealed and corrected in the same round it appears, so nothing false is left planted in your memory unexplained.
How long does one game take?
Ten rounds with a thirty-second timer on each, so at most about five minutes and usually less, because a round ends as soon as you tap a statement. There is no way to bank time between rounds.
Is it the same puzzle for everyone?
Yes. One set of ten rounds is served per UTC day and the same set goes to every player, with a fresh case at midnight UTC. That is what makes comparing a verdict with a friend meaningful — you both faced the identical statements.
What does "% got fooled" mean, and why is it sometimes missing?
It is the real share of that day's players who failed to catch that particular fabrication. It is hidden until at least twenty people have finished the day, and it is never estimated or filled in with a plausible-looking number — so if you are playing early or the game is quiet, the line simply is not there.
Can I play past days?
Yes, through the case archive, which lists roughly the last month of closed cases. Each past case opens fully declassified — the fabrication marked, and the truth behind all three statements — which makes it a usable practice set. Today's case stays sealed until you have played it.

Last reviewed 2026-09-17.