Case File #0069

Aug 29, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Eiffel Tower can stand about 15 centimeters taller in summer, because its iron expands as it heats up.

      TRUE. Metals expand when warmed, so the tower literally grows a bit in the summer sun.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Metal feels colder than wood in the same room because metal naturally sits a few degrees below room temperature.

      FALSE. Both are at the same temperature; metal only feels colder because it pulls heat from your hand much faster.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Under certain conditions, hot water can freeze faster than cold water, an effect named after Erasto Mpemba.

      TRUE. This counterintuitive Mpemba effect has been observed, though the exact reasons are still debated.

  2. Round 2 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The French Revolution erupted in 1789, marked by dramatic events including the storming of the Bastille.

      TRUE — the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 became the Revolution's iconic moment.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Revolutionary France introduced a new calendar that replaced seven-day weeks with ten-day cycles.

      TRUE — the Republican calendar used ten-day 'décades' as part of decimalizing time.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The guillotine was invented and personally operated by Joseph-Ignace Guillotin throughout the French Revolution's executions.

      FALSE — Guillotin only proposed a swifter, more humane method and even opposed the death penalty; others designed and ran the device.

  3. Round 3 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Lake Victoria in Africa is the deepest lake on Earth, dropping more than 1,600 metres at its centre.

      FALSE. Lake Victoria is quite shallow (around 80 m); Baikal is the deepest lake, not Victoria.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest freshwater lake in the world.

      TRUE. Baikal is the deepest freshwater lake, plunging over 1,600 metres.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Lake Baikal holds roughly a fifth of the world's unfrozen fresh surface water.

      TRUE. Baikal alone contains about 20% of Earth's unfrozen fresh surface water.

  4. Round 4 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Hummingbirds can hover in place and are the only birds capable of sustained backward flight.

      TRUE — their figure-eight wingstroke generates lift on both the forward and backward sweep, enabling true backward flight.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Tiny hummingbirds survive long migrations by riding on the backs of larger geese for part of the journey.

      FALSE — this is an old folk myth; hummingbirds fly entirely under their own power, and ruby-throated ones cross the Gulf of Mexico nonstop.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A hummingbird's heart can beat more than 1,000 times per minute during vigorous activity.

      TRUE — heart rates well over 1,000 beats per minute support their extreme metabolism.

  5. Round 5 HISTORY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Joan of Arc led French forces to victory and was afterward crowned Queen of France in gratitude.

      FALSE — Joan was never queen; she was captured, tried, and burned at the stake in 1431.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Hundred Years' War between England and France actually ran longer than a century, from 1337 to 1453.

      TRUE — the conflict spanned 116 years of intermittent fighting.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Joan of Arc played a decisive role in lifting the English siege of Orléans in 1429.

      TRUE — her leadership at Orléans marked a turning point for the French cause.

  6. Round 6 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The salt in the ocean comes mainly from rocks on land, dissolved by rain and carried to the sea by rivers over millions of years.

      TRUE. Weathering releases dissolved minerals that rivers steadily deliver to the ocean.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Dead Sea is so salty that people float in it with almost no effort.

      TRUE. Its extreme salt content makes the water much denser than a human body.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Adding salt to water makes it freeze at a higher temperature, which is why the sea ices over faster than a freshwater lake.

      FALSE. Salt lowers the freezing point, so salty seawater freezes at a lower temperature than fresh water.

  7. Round 7 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sugar dissolves faster in cold water than hot, because cold water molecules grip the sugar more tightly.

      FALSE. Sugar dissolves faster in hot water; the added heat gives molecules more energy to break the sugar apart.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Stirring a solution speeds up dissolving by bringing fresh solvent into contact with the solid.

      TRUE. Stirring sweeps away saturated liquid at the surface, letting more solid dissolve.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Carbonated drinks fizz more when warm, because gases dissolve less easily in liquids at higher temperatures.

      TRUE. Warmth drives dissolved carbon dioxide out of solution, so warm soda foams more.

  8. Round 8 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Mariana Trench is so deep that sunlight only reaches its bottom around midday.

      FALSE — no sunlight reaches the bottom at all; light fades out within the first kilometer, and the trench floor lies near 11 km down in total darkness.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The ocean generates a large share of Earth's oxygen, much of it produced by photosynthesizing plankton near the surface.

      TRUE — marine phytoplankton are estimated to produce roughly half of the planet's oxygen.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sound travels several times faster through water than through air.

      TRUE — sound moves about 1,500 m/s in seawater versus about 340 m/s in air, roughly four times faster.

  9. Round 9 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Esperanto is a constructed international language created in the late nineteenth century to be easy to learn as a neutral second language.

      TRUE. It was published in 1887 with regular grammar and roots drawn largely from European languages.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'quiz' was invented overnight in 1791 by a Dublin theatre owner named Daly, who bet he could coin a meaningless word and spread it across the city.

      FALSE. The Daly wager is an unsubstantiated anecdote; 'quiz' appears in use in senses that predate 1791, so the invention story does not hold.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A famously long English word, 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis', was coined to name a lung disease caused by inhaling fine dust.

      TRUE. It is a deliberately constructed term for a silica-dust lung condition and appears in some dictionaries.

  10. Round 10 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Himalayas are still slowly rising because the Indian plate keeps pushing northward into the rest of Asia.

      TRUE — the ongoing collision continues to crumple and lift the range by millimeters each year.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Rock near Everest's summit contains the fossils of sea creatures that once lived on an ancient ocean floor.

      TRUE — the collision that raised the range lifted old seabed limestone, fossils and all, to the top of the world.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The summit of Mount Everest is dark volcanic rock, formed back when the mountain was an active volcano.

      FALSE — Everest was never a volcano; its summit is marine limestone, packed with fossils of creatures from an ancient sea floor.

← 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.