Case File #0064

Aug 24, 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

      Olympus Mons on Mars rises roughly 22 kilometers high, making it the tallest known volcano in the solar system.

      TRUE. It stands about two and a half times the height of Mount Everest above the surrounding plains.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Mars has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos, named for the Greek figures of fear and dread.

      TRUE. Phobos means fear and Deimos means dread, sons of the war god who fits the planet Mars.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Phobos is slowly spiraling away from Mars and will eventually break free to become an independent asteroid.

      FALSE. Phobos is spiraling inward, not outward, and is expected to crash into Mars or shatter into a ring.

  2. Round 2 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Pineapples are native to South America and were encountered by Europeans in the Caribbean in the late 15th century.

      TRUE. The pineapple originated in South America and Europeans first met it during Caribbean voyages around 1493.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The pineapple got its English name because early botanists placed it in the same plant family as pine trees.

      FALSE. It was named for looking like a pine cone; the pineapple is a bromeliad and unrelated to pine trees.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In 18th-century Europe, pineapples were rare luxuries and were sometimes rented out as dinner-table centerpieces.

      TRUE. Pineapples were so costly that hosts displayed, and even rented, them as status symbols rather than eating them.

  3. Round 3 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      New York City was the first U.S. capital and still serves as the seat of the federal government today.

      FALSE. New York was an early capital, but the U.S. seat of government is now Washington, D.C.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Iceland is greener and milder than its name implies, while Greenland is largely covered by ice.

      TRUE. The names are misleading: Iceland has green lowlands and Greenland is mostly ice sheet.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The country of Georgia in the Caucasus shares its name with the U.S. state of Georgia.

      TRUE. There is both a country and a U.S. state called Georgia.

  4. Round 4 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The dot placed above a lowercase 'i' and 'j' has its own name: it is called a 'tittle'.

      TRUE. 'Tittle' means a tiny mark, and it survives in the phrase 'jot and tittle'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Hawaiian alphabet is one of the world's shortest, using only about thirteen letters in total.

      TRUE. It has five vowels and eight consonants (counting the glottal-stop okina), so many sounds are spelled with very few letters.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The symbol '&' is called the ampersand, a name taken from a Parisian printer, Andre Amper, who introduced it into French type in the 1730s.

      FALSE. 'Ampersand' is a slurring of the schoolroom phrase 'and per se and', once recited at the end of the alphabet; no printer named Amper is involved.

  5. Round 5 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A cuttlefish can change its skin colour, pattern and even texture in under a second.

      TRUE. Specialised pigment cells and skin muscles let it shift appearance almost instantly.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Cuttlefish are true fish, belonging to the same vertebrate group as sharks and rays.

      FALSE. Despite the name, they are not fish at all — they are cephalopods, marine molluscs related to octopus and squid.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Inside a cuttlefish is a porous internal shell, the cuttlebone, which helps it control buoyancy and is often given to pet birds.

      TRUE. The gas-and-mineral cuttlebone acts as a buoyancy aid and a calcium supplement for caged birds.

  6. Round 6 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The letter 'e' is the most commonly used letter in written English.

      TRUE. In typical English text, 'e' appears far more often than any other letter.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      There is a single official English word that everyone agrees is the longest word in the language.

      FALSE. There is no universally agreed longest word; the answer depends on how you define a word and which dictionary you consult.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Words such as 'rhythm' and 'syzygy' contain no standard vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u) at all.

      TRUE. Both are spelled using only the letter 'y' where a vowel sound is needed.

  7. Round 7 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Sections of China's northern border walls were built and rebuilt across many dynasties over roughly two thousand years.

      TRUE — construction stretched from early states through the Ming, not a single building campaign.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The best-preserved and most famous stretches of the Great Wall were largely built during the Ming dynasty.

      TRUE — the brick-and-stone Ming walls are what most tourists visit today.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Great Wall of China is a single unbroken wall, and it is the one human structure clearly visible from the Moon.

      FALSE — it is many disconnected walls from different dynasties, and it cannot be seen from the Moon with the naked eye.

  8. Round 8 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Denmark's flag, the Dannebrog, is the youngest national flag still in official use today.

      FALSE. The Dannebrog is regarded as the oldest continuously used national flag, not the youngest.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Nepal's national flag is the only non-rectangular national flag, formed from two stacked triangular pennants.

      TRUE. Nepal's flag is uniquely non-rectangular, made of two pennant shapes.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The flag of Japan shows a single red circle centred on a plain white field.

      TRUE. Japan's flag is a red sun disc on white, the Hinomaru.

  9. Round 9 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A platypus's bill is a hard beak of solid bone, like a bird's, which it uses to crack open nuts.

      FALSE. The bill is soft, rubbery and leathery, packed with electroreceptors that detect the muscle movements of prey, not a bone nutcracker.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The platypus is one of the very few mammals that lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young.

      TRUE. Along with echidnas, it is a monotreme — an egg-laying mammal.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The male platypus has a venomous spur on each hind leg, a rare feature among mammals.

      TRUE. The spur delivers a painful venom, mostly used in fights with rival males.

  10. Round 10 FOOD
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Herbal 'teas' such as chamomile are made from Camellia sinensis leaves harvested before they develop caffeine.

      FALSE. Herbal infusions come from other plants entirely, not from the tea plant, and are more properly called tisanes.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Black tea and green tea come from the same plant, differing mainly in how the leaves are processed and oxidized.

      TRUE. Both come from Camellia sinensis; oxidation level during processing is what separates green from black.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Oolong tea is partially oxidized, sitting between green tea and black tea in its processing.

      TRUE. Oolong's partial oxidation places it in flavor and color between unoxidized green and fully oxidized black tea.

← 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.