Case File #0073

Sep 2, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The International Space Station draws its main electrical power from a small onboard nuclear reactor.

      FALSE. The station runs on large solar arrays, not a reactor, converting sunlight into electricity.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The International Space Station circles Earth about every 90 minutes, so its crew sees roughly 16 sunrises a day.

      TRUE. At orbital speed it laps the planet 16 times daily, giving astronauts frequent sunrises and sunsets.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The International Space Station has been continuously occupied by rotating crews since the year 2000.

      TRUE. Humans have lived aboard without interruption since the first long-duration crew arrived in late 2000.

  2. Round 2 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Black Death tore through Europe in the mid-1300s, killing a very large share of the continent's population.

      TRUE — the plague killed tens of millions, perhaps a third or more of Europeans.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'quarantine' comes from the Italian for forty days, the period ships were once held in isolation.

      TRUE — Venetian-era ports isolated arriving ships for forty days as a plague precaution.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      During the Black Death, physicians correctly blamed fleas on rats and quarantined the animals to halt the spread.

      FALSE — medieval doctors had no idea fleas or rats carried the disease; the flea-rat link was only understood in the 1890s.

  3. Round 3 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Gold is the densest naturally occurring element, heavier than osmium, iridium and platinum.

      FALSE. Osmium and iridium are denser than gold; gold is very dense but not the densest element.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The gold in Earth's crust was likely forged in extreme cosmic events, such as colliding neutron stars, and delivered by ancient asteroid impacts.

      TRUE. Heavy elements like gold form in rare, violent events and were later delivered to the surface.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Gold is so malleable that a single gram can be hammered into a sheet of about one square metre.

      TRUE. Gold's extraordinary ductility allows a gram to be beaten into a remarkably thin, wide foil.

  4. Round 4 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Some early English ketchup recipes were built around mushrooms or walnuts rather than tomatoes.

      TRUE. 18th- and 19th-century England knew mushroom and walnut ketchups; tomato was just one of many 'ketchup' bases.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The sauce's Southeast Asian ancestor was a fermented fish preparation, not a tomato product.

      TRUE. The original was a salty fermented fish/seafood sauce; sweet tomato ketchup is a later Western reinvention.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'ketchup' comes from a Nahuatl term the Aztecs used for a spiced tomato relish served at feasts.

      FALSE. 'Ketchup' traces to the Hokkien Chinese word ke-tsiap, a fermented fish and brine sauce, with no Aztec or tomato connection.

  5. Round 5 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Chili peppers are native to the Americas and spread across the rest of the world after transatlantic contact.

      TRUE. Chilies originated in the Americas and only reached Asia, Africa, and Europe after 15th-century contact.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Capsaicin binds to receptors that also respond to heat, which is part of why spicy food can feel 'hot.'

      TRUE. Capsaicin activates heat-sensing receptors, so the brain interprets spice as a burning, hot sensation.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The heat of a chili pepper comes from capsaicin, which is concentrated mainly in the seeds themselves.

      FALSE. Capsaicin is concentrated in the pale inner membrane (the placenta), not the seeds; seeds just sit near it.

  6. Round 6 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      As iron rusts, it slowly loses weight because the metal flakes away into lighter oxide dust.

      FALSE. Rusting adds oxygen from the air, so a rusted piece of iron actually weighs more than before.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Stainless steel resists rust because its chromium forms an invisible, self-repairing oxide layer on the surface.

      TRUE. That thin chromium-oxide film reforms when scratched, keeping the steel protected.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Gold is so chemically unreactive that it barely tarnishes, which is why ancient gold artifacts still gleam.

      TRUE. Gold resists reacting with oxygen and most acids, so it keeps its shine for millennia.

  7. Round 7 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A kangaroo is a marsupial whose newborn is born tiny and hairless, then finishes growing inside the mother's pouch.

      TRUE. The joey is roughly bean-sized at birth and crawls to the pouch to develop further.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A kangaroo's tail is a simple, muscle-free counterweight used only for balance while standing still.

      FALSE. The tail is heavily muscled and acts like a fifth limb, pushing the body forward while the kangaroo walks slowly.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A kangaroo cannot move its hind legs independently on land, so it is unable to hop or walk backwards.

      TRUE. Its large tail and the way its legs work together make backward motion effectively impossible.

  8. Round 8 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Honey is so low in moisture and naturally acidic that it resists spoiling, and sealed honey found in ancient tombs has remained edible.

      TRUE. Its low water content and acidity prevent most microbes from growing, so it can last essentially indefinitely.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      If honey crystallises and turns grainy in the jar, it has spoiled and should be thrown away.

      FALSE. Crystallisation is a normal, harmless process; gently warming the jar returns the honey to a liquid.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Honeybees make honey by repeatedly passing nectar between workers and fanning it with their wings to evaporate water.

      TRUE. The process concentrates nectar into the thick, shelf-stable syrup we call honey.

  9. Round 9 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Bats are the only mammals capable of sustained, powered flight rather than just gliding.

      TRUE. Other 'flying' mammals such as flying squirrels only glide; bats flap and truly fly.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Bats are completely blind, and their eyes contain no light-sensing cells at all.

      FALSE. All bats can see, and many fruit bats have large eyes with excellent vision; they are not blind.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Many bats navigate and hunt in darkness by emitting high-frequency calls and reading the returning echoes.

      TRUE. This echolocation lets them detect and chase insects in total darkness.

  10. Round 10 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Berlin Wall, which split East and West Berlin for decades, was finally opened in 1989.

      TRUE — the border opened on the night of 9 November 1989 amid mass demonstrations.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Berlin Wall stood for roughly twenty-eight years before it was opened to free passage.

      TRUE — it divided the city from 1961 until 1989.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      West Germany built the Berlin Wall to stop East Germans from pouring into the prosperous capitalist west.

      FALSE — it was East Germany that built the Wall, and it was meant to stop its own citizens from fleeing westward.

← 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.