Case File #0062

Aug 22, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Lightning never strikes the same spot twice, because each discharge permanently ruins the air's ability to conduct there.

      FALSE. Lightning frequently hits the same place; tall structures get struck many times every year.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Empire State Building is hit by lightning roughly 20 to 25 times per year.

      TRUE. Its height makes it a favorite lightning target, struck around two dozen times annually.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Thunder is the sound of air violently expanding after being superheated by a lightning bolt.

      TRUE. The bolt heats air explosively, and the rapid expansion creates the shockwave we hear as thunder.

  2. Round 2 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A praying mantis has ears on its head that let it hear birdsong from hundreds of metres away.

      FALSE. Most mantises have a single ear on the underside of the thorax, tuned mainly to the ultrasound of hunting bats, not birdsong.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A praying mantis is the only insect known to be able to turn its head and look over its shoulder.

      TRUE. Its flexible neck joint lets it swivel its triangular head far to the side to track movement.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A female praying mantis sometimes eats the male during or after mating.

      TRUE. Sexual cannibalism occurs in some mantis species, though it is not universal.

  3. Round 3 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Caesar salad is generally credited to a restaurateur working in Tijuana, Mexico, in the 1920s.

      TRUE. The dish is widely traced to a Tijuana restaurant kitchen in the 1920s, near the U.S. border.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The classic dressing is built from ingredients such as garlic, lemon, egg, and Parmesan cheese.

      TRUE. Emulsified egg, lemon, garlic, oil, and Parmesan form the backbone of the traditional dressing.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Caesar salad was named after the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, whose banquets featured an early version of it.

      FALSE. It is named for restaurateur Caesar Cardini, not the Roman emperor, and dates to the 20th century.

  4. Round 4 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Flamingos hatch grey-white and only turn pink over time from pigments in the algae and tiny crustaceans they eat.

      TRUE — carotenoid pigments in their food dye the feathers pink; a flamingo fed a plain diet fades toward white.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A flamingo can balance on one leg for only a few minutes before muscle fatigue forces it to switch legs.

      FALSE — the one-legged stance is the low-effort, near-passive posture; flamingos hold it effortlessly, even while asleep.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Flamingos feed with their heads upside down, using comb-like structures in the bill to filter small food from the water.

      TRUE — the bill works as a strainer while held inverted, sieving out algae and shrimp-like prey.

  5. Round 5 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Some ants can carry objects many times their own body weight, and ants can link their bodies into living rafts to survive floods.

      TRUE. Ants are famously strong for their size and will interlock into floating, water-resistant rafts.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Ants are solitary insects that meet only briefly to mate before going their separate ways.

      FALSE. Ants are among the most social animals on Earth, living in colonies of thousands or millions with divided labour.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Ants communicate mainly through chemical signals called pheromones, laying scent trails that lead nestmates to food.

      TRUE. A forager leaves a pheromone trail that other ants follow and reinforce.

  6. Round 6 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'butterfly' was originally 'flutterby', and its two parts were swapped over the centuries through common mispronunciation.

      FALSE. The historical form is 'butterfly' (Old English buttorfleoge); 'flutterby' is a modern playful reversal, not the original.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'lord' descends from an Old English compound meaning roughly 'loaf-keeper' or guardian of the bread.

      TRUE. 'Hlafweard' (loaf-ward) contracted over time into 'lord'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'window' comes from an Old Norse compound literally meaning 'wind-eye'.

      TRUE. Early openings let in air and light, so they were called a 'wind-eye'.

  7. Round 7 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Sahara is the single largest desert on Earth, larger even than the continent of Antarctica.

      FALSE. Antarctica is actually the largest desert on Earth; the Sahara is only the largest hot one.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Sahara is the world's largest hot desert, covering an area roughly comparable to the United States.

      TRUE. The Sahara is the largest hot desert, about the size of the continental US.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Antarctica is classified as a desert because it receives extremely little precipitation.

      TRUE. Despite the ice, Antarctica's very low precipitation makes it a desert by definition.

  8. Round 8 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Vatican City is the world's smallest independent country measured by land area.

      TRUE. Vatican City is the smallest sovereign state on Earth by area.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Monaco is the world's second-smallest country and hosts a famous Formula 1 street race.

      TRUE. Monaco is the second-smallest state and home to the Monaco Grand Prix.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      San Marino is a small island nation located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

      FALSE. San Marino is a landlocked microstate completely surrounded by Italy, not an island.

  9. Round 9 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Saturn is the only planet in the solar system that has a ring system around it.

      FALSE. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings too; Saturn's are just far brighter and easier to see.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Saturn's average density is so low that, given a big enough ocean, the planet would float in water.

      TRUE. Saturn's mean density is less than that of water, the only planet for which this is the case.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Saturn's moon Titan has surface lakes and rivers filled with liquid methane and ethane instead of water.

      TRUE. Titan is the only other world known to have stable liquid on its surface, though it's hydrocarbons.

  10. Round 10 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The shore of the Dead Sea is the lowest exposed land on Earth, sitting over 400 metres below sea level.

      TRUE. The Dead Sea shoreline is the lowest dry land on the planet, roughly 430 m below sea level.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Dead Sea is the largest inland body of saltwater on Earth, exceeding even the Caspian Sea in area.

      FALSE. The Caspian Sea is by far the largest inland body of water; the Dead Sea is comparatively tiny.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Pacific is both the largest and the deepest of Earth's oceans.

      TRUE. The Pacific is the biggest ocean and contains the deepest known point, the Mariana Trench.

← 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.