Case File #0068

Aug 28, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Not all penguins live in the cold; the Galapagos penguin lives right at the equator.

      TRUE — cool ocean currents let this species survive on tropical equatorial islands.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Penguins have hollow, air-filled bones like other birds, which helps them bob back up to the surface.

      FALSE — penguins have unusually dense, solid bones; that reduces buoyancy and helps them dive rather than bob upward.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Male emperor penguins incubate the egg balanced on their feet through the Antarctic winter while females go to feed.

      TRUE — fathers fast for weeks in the cold, sheltering the egg under a fold of skin until it hatches.

  2. Round 2 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Korean writing system Hangul was created in the fifteenth century and designed so that consonant shapes echo the position of the mouth and tongue.

      TRUE. Hangul was purpose-built, and several letter forms sketch how the speech organs make the sound.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Japanese writing system combines more than one script, including kanji characters that were originally borrowed from Chinese.

      TRUE. Modern Japanese mixes kanji with the kana syllabaries hiragana and katakana.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'emoji' comes from blending the English words 'emotion' and 'icon', reflecting the little symbols' Silicon Valley origins.

      FALSE. 'Emoji' is Japanese, from 'e' (picture) and 'moji' (character); its resemblance to 'emotion' is a coincidence, and the pictographs originated in Japan.

  3. Round 3 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills while a third drives it around the rest of the body.

      TRUE — and the body heart pauses whenever the octopus swims, which tires it out and is why it often prefers to crawl.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Octopuses are likely colorblind, yet each sucker holds a tiny lens that focuses light, acting as a backup eye.

      FALSE — suckers carry chemical and touch sensors, not lenses or eyes. Octopuses are probably colorblind, but they don't 'see' with their arms.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Octopus blood is blue because it carries oxygen using a copper-based protein called hemocyanin rather than iron-based hemoglobin.

      TRUE — copper turns the oxygen-carrying protein blue, which works better than iron in cold, low-oxygen water.

  4. Round 4 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The 'mare' in 'nightmare' comes from an old word for a malicious spirit believed to sit on a sleeper's chest, not from the word for a female horse.

      TRUE. The 'mare' was an incubus-like demon; the horse meaning is unrelated coincidence.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'disaster' comes from roots meaning 'bad star', reflecting an old belief that misfortune flowed from unfavourable star positions.

      TRUE. It joins a negative prefix with a word for 'star', an astrological idea of ill-fated alignments.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'news' is an acronym formed from the four compass directions: North, East, West and South.

      FALSE. 'News' is simply the plural of 'new' (new things); the tidy compass-directions story is a myth.

  5. Round 5 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      An elephant's trunk contains a single long bone that lets it lift heavy logs.

      FALSE — the trunk has no bones at all; it's a boneless structure built from tens of thousands of muscle units.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Elephants can communicate across long distances using low-frequency rumbles, some too deep for humans to hear.

      TRUE — these infrasonic rumbles can travel for kilometers and coordinate distant herds.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Elephants can pick up ground vibrations through their feet, helping them sense distant events.

      TRUE — they detect seismic waves through sensitive feet and can respond to vibrations from far away.

  6. Round 6 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'sincere' comes from the Latin 'sine cera', meaning 'without wax', from honest sculptors who refused to hide cracks in marble with wax filler.

      FALSE. 'Sincere' comes from Latin 'sincerus' (clean, pure, whole); the charming 'without wax' sculptor story is a well-known folk etymology with no support.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The English word 'salary' derives from the Latin 'salarium', a term connected to salt and to allowances paid to Roman soldiers.

      TRUE. Salarium linked to 'sal' (salt); the Romans tied pay to this word, which is where 'worth your salt' feeling comes from.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'ketchup' most likely traces back through Malay to a Hokkien Chinese term for a fermented fish or seafood sauce.

      TRUE. The original sauce was nothing like the tomato version; the fish-sauce ancestor travelled via Southeast Asian trade into English.

  7. Round 7 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Water is one of the few substances that expands when it freezes, which is why ice floats.

      TRUE. Water is densest as a liquid at about 4 degrees Celsius, and ice is less dense than liquid water.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Because ice floats, it forms an insulating layer on top of a lake, allowing fish and other life to survive the winter below.

      TRUE. The floating ice layer slows further freezing and keeps the water beneath liquid.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Water is most dense as ice, which is why the coldest layer in a frozen pond sinks to the very bottom.

      FALSE. Water is densest as a liquid at around 4 degrees Celsius; ice is less dense and stays on top.

  8. Round 8 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Buzz Aldrin quietly took Christian communion on the lunar surface, likely the first food and drink consumed on the Moon.

      TRUE. Aldrin brought a small communion kit from his church and used it shortly after landing in 1969.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Neil Armstrong's first words after stepping onto the Moon were written for him weeks earlier by NASA's public affairs office.

      FALSE. Armstrong always maintained he came up with 'one small step' himself, around the time of the landing, not from a NASA script.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Apollo 11 crew left a small silicon disc on the Moon carrying goodwill messages from leaders of dozens of nations.

      TRUE. The etched disc shrank statements from world leaders to microscopic text and still sits on the surface.

  9. Round 9 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Sputnik 1, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957, was a metal sphere roughly the size of a beach ball.

      TRUE. The polished sphere was about 58 centimeters across and kicked off the space age.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A dog named Laika, aboard Sputnik 2, became one of the first living creatures to orbit the Earth.

      TRUE. Laika launched in 1957, an early and famous animal passenger of the space race.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1, transmitted live television pictures of Earth back to the Soviet Union.

      FALSE. Sputnik 1 only broadcast simple radio beeps; it carried no camera or television equipment.

  10. Round 10 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Black holes act as cosmic vacuum cleaners, actively pulling in any matter within several light-years of them.

      FALSE. A black hole's gravity behaves like any other mass; you could orbit one safely from a distance, as planets orbit stars.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The first direct image of a black hole's shadow was released in 2019, showing the giant one in galaxy M87.

      TRUE. The Event Horizon Telescope combined dishes worldwide to capture the glowing ring around it.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Not even light can escape from within a black hole's event horizon, the boundary of no return.

      TRUE. Past that boundary, escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, so nothing gets back out.

← 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.