Case File #0066

Aug 26, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Carrots were originally cultivated in colors like purple and yellow, with orange becoming common only later.

      TRUE. Early domesticated carrots were purple and yellow; the familiar orange carrot rose to prominence centuries afterward.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Wild carrots were first domesticated for their sweet roots in ancient Egypt around the same time as wheat.

      FALSE. Carrot domestication is centered on Central Asia far more recently, and early carrots were grown for leaves and seeds, not sweet roots.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Early carrot growing valued the plant's aromatic leaves and seeds before its root became the prize.

      TRUE. Like related plants, the carrot was first useful for its foliage and seeds before selective breeding fattened the root.

  2. Round 2 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Australia's capital is Sydney, its most populous city and the home of the famous harbourside Opera House.

      FALSE. Australia's capital is Canberra. Sydney is the biggest city, but it has never been the capital.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Canberra was purpose-built as Australia's capital, a compromise to settle the rivalry between Sydney and Melbourne.

      TRUE. Neither big city would yield, so a brand-new capital was planned between them.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sydney is Australia's most populous city, with a population well above four million people.

      TRUE. Sydney is Australia's largest city by population, even though it isn't the capital.

  3. Round 3 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Early forms of sushi used fermented rice to preserve fish, and that rice was often thrown away rather than eaten.

      TRUE. In early 'narezushi,' rice fermentation preserved the fish and the rice was frequently discarded before eating.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The fast, hand-pressed vinegared-rice 'nigiri' style was invented in Kyoto's imperial court in the 1600s.

      FALSE. Nigiri arose in Edo (old Tokyo) in the early 1800s as fast street food, not in Kyoto's court in the 1600s.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Adding vinegar to sushi rice both seasons it and echoes the sourness that fermentation once provided.

      TRUE. Vinegared rice mimics the tang of older fermented sushi while letting the dish be made quickly.

  4. Round 4 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Nile lies entirely within Egypt, running from its source to its mouth without leaving the country.

      FALSE. The Nile crosses many countries; its waters gather from the Great Lakes region and Ethiopia before reaching Egypt.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Nile is one of the world's longest rivers and flows generally northward, emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

      TRUE. Unusually, the Nile flows north and drains into the Mediterranean via its Egyptian delta.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Amazon discharges more water into the ocean than any other river on Earth.

      TRUE. By sheer volume of water discharged, the Amazon dwarfs every other river.

  5. Round 5 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A glacier is a solid, motionless sheet of ice that never moves or changes within a human lifetime.

      FALSE. Glaciers flow continuously, and many advance or retreat measurably within years.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Glaciers hold most of the world's fresh water, far more than all the rivers and lakes combined.

      TRUE. Ice sheets and glaciers lock up the majority of Earth's fresh water.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Glaciers are slow rivers of ice that flow downhill under their own weight, carving and reshaping valleys as they move.

      TRUE. Despite looking solid, glacial ice deforms and creeps downhill over years.

  6. Round 6 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a colossal storm that has been observed raging for at least a couple of centuries.

      TRUE. This anticyclone is wide enough to swallow Earth and has persisted through generations of observation.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Jupiter is so massive that the balance point it shares with the Sun lies just outside the Sun's surface.

      TRUE. The Sun and Jupiter orbit a common center of mass that sits slightly above the Sun's visible edge.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Jupiter has exactly four moons, all of them discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610.

      FALSE. Galileo found the four largest moons, but Jupiter is now known to have dozens more, over ninety in total.

  7. Round 7 HISTORY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Albert Einstein failed mathematics as a schoolboy and very nearly abandoned his studies before switching to physics.

      FALSE — Einstein excelled at mathematics from a young age; he himself dismissed the failing-math story as nonsense.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In 1905, his so-called miracle year, Einstein published four papers that reshaped modern physics.

      TRUE — the 1905 papers covered the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and mass-energy equivalence.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Einstein was offered the presidency of the state of Israel in 1952 but politely turned it down.

      TRUE — he declined, saying he lacked the aptitude for dealing with people and official duties.

  8. Round 8 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The capital of Switzerland is Zurich, its largest city and leading financial centre.

      FALSE. Switzerland's seat of government is Bern; Zurich is the largest city but not the capital.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Zurich is Switzerland's largest city and a major hub of global banking and finance.

      TRUE. Zurich is the biggest Swiss city and a world financial centre.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Bern serves as the seat of Switzerland's federal government.

      TRUE. Bern hosts the Swiss federal government, functioning as the capital.

  9. Round 9 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The use of 'bug' for a computer fault began entirely with a real moth found jamming a machine in 1947, the first time the word ever meant a technical fault.

      FALSE. The 1947 moth was a fun real incident, but 'bug' for a technical defect was already in use decades earlier, so it was not the first such use.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'spam', for unwanted bulk messages, is widely traced to a Monty Python sketch built around the canned meat of the same name.

      TRUE. The sketch's endless repetition of 'spam' inspired the term for flooding inboxes with repetitive junk.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'byte' was spelled deliberately with a 'y' to keep it from being confused with the smaller unit 'bit' in writing.

      TRUE. The respelling avoided accidental clipping to 'bit' and gave the eight-bit unit a distinct look.

  10. Round 10 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Greenland is the world's largest island that is not classified as a continent.

      TRUE. Greenland is the biggest island on Earth that isn't a continent.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Australia is officially classified as the world's largest island rather than as a continent.

      FALSE. Australia is considered a continent, not an island; Greenland is the largest island.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Indonesia is an archipelago made up of many thousands of separate islands.

      TRUE. Indonesia consists of thousands of islands spread across the equator.

← 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.