Case File #0078

Sep 7, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Early forms of sushi used fermented rice to preserve fish, and that rice was often thrown away rather than eaten.

      TRUE. In early 'narezushi,' rice fermentation preserved the fish and the rice was frequently discarded before eating.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The fast, hand-pressed vinegared-rice 'nigiri' style was invented in Kyoto's imperial court in the 1600s.

      FALSE. Nigiri arose in Edo (old Tokyo) in the early 1800s as fast street food, not in Kyoto's court in the 1600s.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Adding vinegar to sushi rice both seasons it and echoes the sourness that fermentation once provided.

      TRUE. Vinegared rice mimics the tang of older fermented sushi while letting the dish be made quickly.

  2. Round 2 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.

  3. Round 3 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.

  4. Round 4 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Auroras are triggered when charged particles streaming from the Sun collide with gases high in Earth's atmosphere.

      TRUE — Earth's magnetic field funnels these particles toward the poles, where they energize the upper-atmosphere gases.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Auroras occur on other planets too, including Jupiter and Saturn.

      TRUE — any planet with a magnetic field and an atmosphere can host auroras, and gas giants show powerful ones.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The green in an aurora comes from sunlight reflecting off ice crystals high in the atmosphere.

      FALSE — the green light is emitted by oxygen atoms that were energized by incoming particles, not reflected sunlight.

  5. Round 5 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.

  6. Round 6 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Mount Everest is the highest point on Earth above sea level, reaching roughly 8,849 metres.

      TRUE. Everest's summit is the highest land elevation measured from sea level.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Kilimanjaro is the highest mountain in Africa and a free-standing volcano rising from surrounding plains.

      TRUE. Kilimanjaro is Africa's tallest peak and famously stands alone rather than in a range.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Mount Kilimanjaro is the tallest mountain on Earth when measured from its base to its summit.

      FALSE. Measured base-to-summit, Hawaii's Mauna Kea is tallest; Everest is highest above sea level.

  7. Round 7 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Sections of China's northern border walls were built and rebuilt across many dynasties over roughly two thousand years.

      TRUE — construction stretched from early states through the Ming, not a single building campaign.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The best-preserved and most famous stretches of the Great Wall were largely built during the Ming dynasty.

      TRUE — the brick-and-stone Ming walls are what most tourists visit today.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Great Wall of China is a single unbroken wall, and it is the one human structure clearly visible from the Moon.

      FALSE — it is many disconnected walls from different dynasties, and it cannot be seen from the Moon with the naked eye.

  8. Round 8 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.

  9. Round 9 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.

  10. Round 10 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Venus flytraps catch insects mainly for the meat, which they need to survive the way animals do.

      FALSE. They make their own food by photosynthesis; trapped insects supply nutrients like nitrogen missing from their poor soil.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A Venus flytrap counts how many times its trigger hairs are touched, snapping shut only once it has been stimulated enough.

      TRUE. It waits for repeated touches so it does not waste energy closing on a false alarm.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Venus flytraps are native to a small coastal region of North and South Carolina in the United States.

      TRUE. In the wild they grow only in a limited bog habitat in the Carolinas.

← 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.