Case File #0076

Sep 5, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 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.

  2. Round 2 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.

  3. Round 3 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Antarctica is the largest desert on Earth, because a desert is defined by low precipitation rather than heat.

      TRUE. It receives so little precipitation that, by that definition, it qualifies as a polar desert.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Antarctica is the smallest continent, covering less area than Australia.

      FALSE. Australia is the smallest continent; Antarctica is roughly twice its size.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Antarctica's ice sheet holds a majority of the world's fresh water, far more than all rivers and lakes.

      TRUE. Roughly 60 to 70 percent of Earth's fresh water is locked in the Antarctic ice sheet.

  4. Round 4 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.

  5. Round 5 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'cereal' comes from the Latin 'serere', meaning 'to sow seeds', later respelled with an initial 'c'.

      FALSE. 'Cereal' comes from Ceres, the Roman goddess of grain and agriculture, not from 'serere'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'panic' derives from the Greek god Pan, who was blamed for the sudden, groundless fear that could seize people in lonely places.

      TRUE. 'Panic' fear was 'of Pan', the wild god thought to cause unexplained dread.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'volcano' comes from Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and the forge.

      TRUE. The fiery mountains were linked to Vulcan's underground workshops.

  6. Round 6 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Asia is both the largest continent by area and the most populous.

      TRUE. Asia leads the world in both land area and population.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Africa is the largest continent on Earth by total land area.

      FALSE. Asia is the largest continent by area; Africa ranks second.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Africa is the second-largest continent by land area.

      TRUE. Africa ranks second in size, after Asia.

  7. Round 7 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Owls have eyes powerful enough to see clearly in complete, pitch-black darkness.

      FALSE. Owls see very well in low light but, like every eye, still need some light; they cannot see in total darkness.

    • ✓ TRUE

      An owl can rotate its head about 270 degrees, more than three-quarters of a full turn.

      TRUE. Extra neck vertebrae and specially adapted blood vessels let it turn far beyond what a human neck allows.

    • ✓ TRUE

      An owl's eyes are fixed in their sockets, so it must turn its whole head to look around.

      TRUE. Owls cannot roll their eyes side to side, which is why they swivel their heads instead.

  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 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      New York City was the first U.S. capital and still serves as the seat of the federal government today.

      FALSE. New York was an early capital, but the U.S. seat of government is now Washington, D.C.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Iceland is greener and milder than its name implies, while Greenland is largely covered by ice.

      TRUE. The names are misleading: Iceland has green lowlands and Greenland is mostly ice sheet.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The country of Georgia in the Caucasus shares its name with the U.S. state of Georgia.

      TRUE. There is both a country and a U.S. state called Georgia.

  10. Round 10 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Nile is the only major river in the world that flows from south to north, which long made maps of it unusual.

      FALSE — plenty of large rivers flow south-to-north; direction depends only on where the land slopes downhill, so the Nile isn't unique.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Amazon River discharges more water into the sea than the next several largest rivers combined.

      TRUE — its outflow is so vast that it dilutes ocean saltiness far offshore from its mouth.

    • ✓ TRUE

      For most of its length the Amazon's main stem has no bridges crossing it.

      TRUE — width, wetlands, and sparse road networks mean the main river is crossed almost entirely by boat.

← 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.