Case File #0061

Aug 21, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Angel Falls in Venezuela is the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall.

      TRUE. Angel Falls has the highest uninterrupted drop of any waterfall, near 979 metres.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Niagara Falls lies on the border between the United States and Canada.

      TRUE. Niagara Falls straddles the U.S.-Canada border between Ontario and New York.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Niagara Falls is the tallest waterfall in the world, with a drop of more than 800 metres.

      FALSE. Niagara is only about 50 metres tall; the tallest waterfall is Angel Falls.

  2. Round 2 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A sloth moves so slowly that algae grows in its fur, giving it a greenish tint that helps it hide among leaves.

      TRUE. The algae thrives in the sloth's grooved fur and lends a green camouflage among the canopy.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Three-toed sloths climb down from their tree only about once a week, usually to defecate at the base of the trunk.

      TRUE. They make a risky weekly descent to the ground almost exclusively to relieve themselves.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      When threatened, a sloth can sprint at up to 15 kilometres an hour to outrun a predator.

      FALSE. Sloths are among the slowest mammals; on the ground they typically crawl at a fraction of a kilometre per hour.

  3. Round 3 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'thug' entered English from a South Asian language, originally naming members of an organised band of robbers in India.

      TRUE. It comes from a Hindi/Urdu word for a cheat or robber, tied to gangs that preyed on travellers.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'juggernaut', for an unstoppable force, derives from a Sanskrit name for a Hindu deity, linked to massive processional temple carts.

      TRUE. It comes from Jagannath, whose huge festival cart gave the sense of a crushing, unstoppable thing.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'shampoo' comes from the French 'champ pur', meaning 'pure field', a nod to the herbal meadows used in early hair washes.

      FALSE. 'Shampoo' comes from a Hindi word meaning to press or massage; it first meant a body massage before shifting to hair-washing, and has no French 'pure field' origin.

  4. Round 4 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.

  5. Round 5 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A hot-air balloon floats because the heated air inside it is less dense than the cooler air outside.

      TRUE. Warming the trapped air makes it lighter than the surrounding air, giving the balloon lift.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Hot air rises because heat itself is a light, floating substance that drifts upward through cooler air.

      FALSE. Heat isn't a substance; hot air rises simply because it expands and becomes less dense than cool air.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Convection currents form as warmer, less dense fluid rises while cooler, denser fluid sinks.

      TRUE. This continual rise-and-sink cycle is what drives convection in air and water.

  6. Round 6 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Obsidian is a natural volcanic glass that forms when lava cools so quickly that mineral crystals have no time to grow.

      TRUE — the near-instant cooling locks the material into a glassy, non-crystalline state.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Molten rock is called magma once it reaches the surface, and lava while it is still underground.

      FALSE — it's the reverse: molten rock is magma underground and lava once it erupts onto the surface.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Measured from its base on the ocean floor to its peak, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is taller than Mount Everest.

      TRUE — base-to-summit it exceeds 10,000 m, beating Everest, which is merely the highest point above sea level.

  7. Round 7 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'cereal' comes from the Latin 'serere', meaning 'to sow seeds', later respelled with an initial 'c'.

      FALSE. 'Cereal' comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, not from 'serere'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'panic' derives from the Greek god Pan, who was blamed for the sudden, groundless fear that could seize people in lonely places.

      TRUE. 'Panic' fear was 'of Pan', the wild god thought to cause unexplained dread.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'volcano' comes from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and the forge.

      TRUE. The fiery mountains were linked to Vulcan's underground workshops.

  8. Round 8 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sound cannot pass through solid steel, because its tightly packed atoms block the vibrations entirely.

      FALSE. Sound travels through steel even faster than through air, at several kilometers per second.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sound travels roughly four times faster in water than it does in air.

      TRUE. Water's tighter molecular packing carries vibrations far quicker than air does.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In the vacuum of space, sound cannot travel because there are no molecules to carry the vibrations.

      TRUE. Sound needs a medium; with no particles to pass the vibration along, space is silent.

  9. Round 9 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The first computer 'bug' was reportedly an actual moth found stuck in a relay of an early computer in 1947.

      TRUE. A real moth was taped into the logbook of the Harvard Mark II, popularizing the term.

    • ✓ TRUE

      An early IBM commercial disk drive from the 1950s stored only about 5 megabytes yet weighed over a ton.

      TRUE. The IBM RAMAC held around 5 MB across huge spinning platters and was enormous by today's standards.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The QWERTY keyboard layout was carefully designed to let typists type as fast as humanly possible.

      FALSE. QWERTY was arranged to reduce typebar jams on early typewriters, not to maximize typing speed.

  10. Round 10 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A camel's hump stores fat, not water, and acts as an energy reserve the animal can metabolise.

      TRUE. The hump is fatty tissue; it does not hold a reservoir of water.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Camels store large reserves of water inside their humps, which is how they survive weeks without drinking.

      FALSE. Their water conservation comes from physiology and behaviour, not a hump water tank — the hump is fat.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Camels can close their nostrils and have long eyelashes plus a third eyelid to keep out blowing sand.

      TRUE. These adaptations protect the eyes and airways in desert storms.

← 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.