Case File #0072

Sep 1, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Thunder is the sound of the lightning bolt striking the ground and splitting the earth.

      FALSE. Thunder is the shockwave of air rapidly expanding after being superheated by the bolt, not the sound of an impact.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A lightning bolt can heat the air around it to about 30,000 degrees Celsius, several times hotter than the surface of the Sun.

      TRUE. The air along the channel is heated to tens of thousands of degrees in a fraction of a second.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Lightning can strike the same place more than once, and tall structures are hit repeatedly.

      TRUE. The Empire State Building and other tall landmarks are struck many times a year.

  2. Round 2 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A single rotation of Venus takes longer than one full trip around the Sun, so its day is longer than its year.

      TRUE. Venus spins once every 243 Earth days but orbits the Sun in about 225, so a day outlasts a year.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Venus is the only planet in the solar system that spins in the opposite direction to its orbit around the Sun.

      FALSE. Uranus also rotates in a backwards, tilted-on-its-side fashion, so Venus is not the only one.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, even though Mercury orbits closer to the Sun.

      TRUE. Venus's thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat, pushing surface temperatures above 460 degrees Celsius.

  3. Round 3 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Honey recovered from ancient Egyptian tombs was still edible thousands of years later, thanks to its low moisture and natural acidity.

      TRUE. Honey's low water content and acidity choke out microbes, so sealed honey can last practically forever.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Honey never freezes or hardens even far below zero, because its dissolved sugars prevent any crystal structure from forming.

      FALSE. Honey actually crystallizes and stiffens over time; cold speeds up the sugar granulation rather than preventing it.

    • ✓ TRUE

      At a specific low pressure called the triple point, water can boil and freeze at the same time.

      TRUE. At the triple point, water's solid, liquid, and gas phases coexist in equilibrium.

  4. Round 4 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Moon is gradually drifting farther from Earth, moving away by a few centimeters every year.

      TRUE. Tidal interactions push it outward at roughly the rate your fingernails grow.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The same side of the Moon always faces Earth because it turns once on its axis for each orbit it makes.

      TRUE. This tidal locking keeps the far side hidden from Earth-based viewers.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Moon has no gravity of its own, which is why the Apollo astronauts floated rather than walked on it.

      FALSE. The Moon has about one-sixth of Earth's gravity; astronauts bounced and walked, they did not float.

  5. Round 5 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Johannes Gutenberg popularized printing with movable metal type in Europe around the 1450s, transforming how books were made.

      TRUE — his press made mass book production feasible and helped spark the print revolution.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Movable-type printing was unknown anywhere in Asia until European traders introduced Gutenberg's press in the 1500s.

      FALSE — movable type existed in China by the 11th century and metal type in Korea before Gutenberg was even born.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Gutenberg's most celebrated printed work was an edition of the Bible produced in the 1450s.

      TRUE — the Gutenberg Bible is among the earliest major books printed with movable type in Europe.

  6. Round 6 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      'Quarantine' comes from the Italian 'quaranta giorni', meaning 'forty days', the isolation period imposed on arriving ships in Venice.

      TRUE. Venetian authorities held suspect ships forty days before landing, and the count itself named the practice.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'robot' entered English from Czech, coined for a 1920 play, from a term relating to forced labour or drudgery.

      TRUE. It comes from Karel Capek's play R.U.R.; the Czech root 'robota' means compulsory labour.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'posh' is an acronym for 'Port Out, Starboard Home', marking the shaded, cooler cabins wealthy passengers booked on voyages to India.

      FALSE. There is no evidence for the 'Port Out Starboard Home' story; 'posh' has no confirmed acronymic origin and the tale was invented later.

  7. Round 7 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Glass is made mainly from sand, which is melted at very high temperatures into a clear solid.

      TRUE. Silica sand is the primary ingredient, melted and cooled into glass.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Tempered glass breaks into small blunt pieces instead of sharp shards, due to internal stress from rapid cooling.

      TRUE. Quick cooling locks in stresses that make the glass crumble into pebbles when it fails.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Bulletproof glass is really just one extremely thick pane of specially hardened crystal.

      FALSE. It's actually layers of glass bonded with tough plastic like polycarbonate, which absorb and spread the impact.

  8. Round 8 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Great Barrier Reef is the largest living structure on Earth and is visible from space.

      TRUE. Stretching thousands of kilometres, it is built by living organisms and can be seen from orbit.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Coral reefs are built by tiny animals called polyps that secrete hard calcium carbonate skeletons.

      TRUE. Billions of polyps lay down limestone skeletons that form the reef structure.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Great Barrier Reef is a single enormous living organism, one connected creature thousands of kilometres long.

      FALSE. It is a vast collection of billions of individual coral polyps across many separate colonies, not one organism.

  9. Round 9 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Coriolis effect decides which way water swirls down your bathroom drain in each hemisphere.

      FALSE. At a sink's scale the Coriolis force is far too weak; basin shape and initial motion decide the swirl.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Ice floats because water is unusual: it expands and grows less dense when it freezes.

      TRUE. Water's crystal structure spreads molecules apart, so ice is lighter than liquid water.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Salt lowers the freezing point of water, which is why it's scattered on icy roads in winter.

      TRUE. Dissolved salt makes water freeze at a lower temperature, helping melt road ice.

  10. Round 10 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      There is evidence of pasta-like foods in Italy before Marco Polo's travels, undercutting the story that he introduced it.

      TRUE. Records show pasta in Italy predating Marco Polo, so he could not have brought the first noodles home.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Dried durum-wheat pasta was being produced in medieval Sicily, helping it spread around the Mediterranean.

      TRUE. Medieval Sicily was an early hub of dried pasta production, aiding trade and its wider spread.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Marco Polo brought the first noodles to Italy from China, which is why Italians began making pasta.

      FALSE. This is a popular myth; pasta already existed in Italy before Marco Polo's journey to Asia.

← 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.