Case File #0065

Aug 25, 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

      Teflon was invented specifically for the Apollo space program to shield spacecraft from heat.

      FALSE. Teflon was discovered by accident in 1938, decades before Apollo, and wasn't created for spacecraft.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Superglue sets so fast because moisture, even the humidity in air, triggers it to harden.

      TRUE. Cyanoacrylate glue cures on contact with trace water, which is why it grabs skin so quickly.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Non-stick pans are coated with PTFE, a polymer so slippery that very little will stick to it.

      TRUE. PTFE (Teflon) has an extremely low-friction surface that resists sticking.

  2. Round 2 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'gymnasium' derives from a Greek word connected to exercising naked, which was customary for athletes in ancient training grounds.

      TRUE. The Greek 'gymnos' means naked, and athletes trained without clothing.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'tip', meaning a gratuity, began as an acronym for 'To Insure Promptness' printed on jars in old English coffeehouses.

      FALSE. 'Tip' predates that story and is not an acronym; the 'To Insure Promptness' tale was invented long after the word was in use.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'companion' breaks down into Latin roots meaning 'with' and 'bread' — literally, someone you share bread with.

      TRUE. It joins 'com-' (with) and 'panis' (bread), the idea of a messmate.

  3. Round 3 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.

  4. Round 4 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.

  5. Round 5 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Finnish and Hungarian belong to the same language family and are not part of the large group that includes English, French and Russian.

      TRUE. Both are Uralic (Finno-Ugric), unrelated to the Indo-European languages around them.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'pumpernickel' comes from Napoleon, who tasted the dark bread and called it 'pain pour Nicole', naming it after his horse Nicole.

      FALSE. That is a popular folk tale; 'pumpernickel' is German, combining a word for breaking wind with 'Nickel', a jibe at the coarse, hard-to-digest bread.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'assassin' is generally traced to an Arabic term historically linked to a medieval sect in the Middle East.

      TRUE. It goes back to 'hashishin', a name applied to members of that sect, then borrowed into European languages.

  6. Round 6 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Blue whales hunt by chasing down and swallowing large fish and seals, using bursts of speed to catch them.

      FALSE. They are filter feeders that engulf huge mouthfuls of water and strain out tiny krill with baleen.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever lived, outweighing every dinosaur on record.

      TRUE. At up to about 180 tonnes, the blue whale exceeds any known dinosaur in mass.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A blue whale's heart is roughly the size of a small car, and its tongue alone can weigh about as much as an elephant.

      TRUE. The heart weighs hundreds of kilograms, and the tongue's mass approaches that of an elephant.

  7. Round 7 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sea otters keep warm with a thick layer of blubber, just like seals and whales.

      FALSE. Sea otters have almost no blubber; instead they rely on the densest fur of any animal to trap insulating air.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sea otters use rocks as tools to crack open shellfish, often keeping a favourite rock tucked in a loose pocket of skin under their arm.

      TRUE. They are one of the few mammals that use tools, storing a chosen stone in an armpit pouch.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sea otters sometimes hold hands or wrap themselves in kelp while sleeping so they do not drift apart.

      TRUE. Holding paws and anchoring in kelp keeps resting rafts together.

  8. Round 8 HISTORY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Ancient Sparta ran a powerful navy that dominated the Mediterranean and rivaled the Persian fleet at its height.

      FALSE — Sparta was a land power built on its infantry; it was Athens that commanded the great Greek navy.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sparta was known for a demanding, state-run military upbringing that shaped its male citizens from boyhood.

      TRUE — the agoge trained Spartan boys for a life centered on soldiering.

    • ✓ TRUE

      At Thermopylae in 480 BC, a small Greek force under the Spartan king Leonidas held a narrow pass against Persia.

      TRUE — Leonidas and his allies made a famous last stand at the pass.

  9. Round 9 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A single cumulus cloud can weigh hundreds of tonnes, yet it floats because that mass is spread thinly across an enormous volume of air.

      TRUE — the water is dispersed as tiny droplets, so the cloud's density stays close to the surrounding air.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Snow is always white because it is made of frozen white ice crystals.

      FALSE — ice is actually clear; snow looks white because light scatters off the many surfaces of countless tiny crystals.

    • ✓ TRUE

      No two snowflakes are structurally identical, because each one grows along a unique path of temperature and humidity.

      TRUE — the branching pattern records the exact conditions the flake passed through, making duplicates effectively impossible.

  10. Round 10 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      The croissant's crescent shape is often linked to Vienna's kipferl pastry rather than to an original French invention.

      TRUE. The crescent kipferl is a Viennese ancestor; the croissant is part of 'viennoiserie,' pastries in the Vienna style.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Layering dough with sheets of butter, called lamination, is what gives the croissant its flaky texture.

      TRUE. Rolling and folding butter into dough creates many thin layers that steam apart into flakes when baked.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The modern flaky, laminated butter croissant appears in French bakery guild records dating to the 1600s.

      FALSE. The laminated yeast-dough croissant is an early-20th-century development; no 1600s French guild recipe describes it.

← 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.