Case File #0067

Aug 27, 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

      Worcestershire sauce is a fermented condiment whose ingredients include anchovies, vinegar, and tamarind.

      TRUE. The sauce's savory depth comes from fermented anchovies plus vinegar, tamarind, and spices.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The sauce originated in the English county of Worcestershire in the 1800s.

      TRUE. Worcestershire sauce takes its name and origin from that English county in the 19th century.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Worcestershire sauce was invented by ancient Roman soldiers who fermented fish with barley while stationed in Britain.

      FALSE. It is a 19th-century English creation from the city of Worcester, not a Roman military invention.

  2. Round 2 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Tardigrades can survive being dried out for years by shriveling into a dormant, barrel-shaped state called a tun.

      TRUE — in the tun state their metabolism nearly stops, letting them wait out drought until water returns.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Tardigrades are the largest animals able to enter cryptobiosis, reaching up to five centimeters in length.

      FALSE — tardigrades are microscopic, typically around half a millimeter long; you generally need a microscope to see them.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Tardigrades have survived direct exposure to the vacuum and radiation of open space.

      TRUE — in a 2007 orbital experiment, some tardigrades exposed to space vacuum and radiation survived and later reproduced.

  3. Round 3 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Earthworms breathe through their skin, which must stay moist for oxygen to pass through.

      TRUE. They have no lungs; gas exchange happens across their damp skin.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Earthworms have no eyes but can sense light through specialised cells in their skin, which is why they avoid the surface in daylight.

      TRUE. Light-sensitive cells let them detect and avoid bright conditions.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Cutting an earthworm in half reliably produces two healthy worms, because both halves grow complete new bodies.

      FALSE. Usually only the front half survives and regenerates a tail; the tail half cannot regrow the vital head end.

  4. Round 4 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Terminal velocity is the steady speed a falling object reaches once air resistance balances gravity.

      TRUE. When drag equals the pull of gravity, the object stops accelerating and falls at a constant speed.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A penny dropped from the top of a skyscraper would kill a pedestrian standing on the sidewalk below.

      FALSE. A penny's shape and low terminal velocity mean it would sting at worst, not kill.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In a vacuum, a feather and a hammer fall at the same rate, as an astronaut showed on the Moon.

      TRUE. With no air resistance, all objects accelerate equally; Apollo 15 demonstrated this on the Moon.

  5. Round 5 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The sentence 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' is a pangram that uses every letter of the English alphabet.

      TRUE. It is the classic example of a sentence containing all 26 letters.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Written English once used more letters than it does today, including characters like thorn (þ) that later fell out of use.

      TRUE. Old English included letters such as thorn and eth that disappeared over time.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The English alphabet has always had exactly 26 letters, unchanged since the language was first written down.

      FALSE. The alphabet evolved over centuries, adding and dropping letters before settling at 26.

  6. Round 6 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Canada is the world's second-largest country by area and shares land borders with three different nations.

      FALSE. Canada is second-largest, but its only land border is with the United States.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Russia is the world's largest country by land area and stretches across eleven time zones.

      TRUE. Russia is by far the biggest country and spans eleven time zones.

    • ✓ TRUE

      China and India are the two most populous countries in the world.

      TRUE. India and China are the world's two most populous nations, each above a billion people.

  7. Round 7 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Venus flytraps catch insects mainly for the meat, which they need to survive the way animals do.

      FALSE. They make their own food by photosynthesis; trapped insects supply nutrients like nitrogen missing from their poor soil.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A Venus flytrap counts how many times its trigger hairs are touched, snapping shut only once it has been stimulated enough.

      TRUE. It waits for repeated touches so it does not waste energy closing on a false alarm.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Venus flytraps are native to a small coastal region of North and South Carolina in the United States.

      TRUE. In the wild they grow only in a limited bog habitat in the Carolinas.

  8. Round 8 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Auroras are triggered when charged particles streaming from the Sun collide with gases high in Earth's atmosphere.

      TRUE — Earth's magnetic field funnels these particles toward the poles, where they energize the upper-atmosphere gases.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Auroras occur on other planets too, including Jupiter and Saturn.

      TRUE — any planet with a magnetic field and an atmosphere can host auroras, and gas giants show powerful ones.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The green in an aurora comes from sunlight reflecting off ice crystals high in the atmosphere.

      FALSE — the green light is emitted by oxygen atoms that were energized by incoming particles, not reflected sunlight.

  9. Round 9 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Roman Colosseum was completed around 80 AD and could seat tens of thousands of spectators for public games.

      TRUE — estimates put capacity near 50,000, filling an enormous stone amphitheatre.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Roman gladiators always fought to the death, and no gladiator ever survived beyond a handful of matches in the arena.

      FALSE — many gladiators survived for years, gained fans, and could win freedom; deaths were costly and not guaranteed.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Ancient Romans mixed volcanic ash into their concrete, helping some of their structures survive for two thousand years.

      TRUE — pozzolanic ash gave Roman concrete remarkable durability, even in seawater.

  10. Round 10 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Fiber-optic cables carry data as pulses of light bouncing along thin strands of glass.

      TRUE. Light signals reflect down the glass fiber, carrying huge amounts of data quickly.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Radio signals travel at the speed of light, so a call across the planet carries a tiny but real delay.

      TRUE. Even at light speed, long distances and relays add a small, noticeable lag.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Wi-Fi signals are a special kind of sound wave, which is why thick walls can muffle them.

      FALSE. Wi-Fi is radio (electromagnetic) waves, not sound; walls weaken them by absorbing radio energy.

← 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.