Case File #0079

Sep 8, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'gymnasium' derives from a Greek word connected to exercising naked, which was customary for athletes in ancient training grounds.

      TRUE. The Greek 'gymnos' means naked, and athletes trained without clothing.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'tip', meaning a gratuity, began as an acronym for 'To Insure Promptness' printed on jars in old English coffeehouses.

      FALSE. 'Tip' predates that story and is not an acronym; the 'To Insure Promptness' tale was invented long after the word was in use.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'companion' breaks down into Latin roots meaning 'with' and 'bread' — literally, someone you share bread with.

      TRUE. It joins 'com-' (with) and 'panis' (bread), the idea of a messmate.

  2. Round 2 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills while a third drives it around the rest of the body.

      TRUE — and the body heart pauses whenever the octopus swims, which tires it out and is why it often prefers to crawl.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Octopuses are likely colorblind, yet each sucker holds a tiny lens that focuses light, acting as a backup eye.

      FALSE — suckers carry chemical and touch sensors, not lenses or eyes. Octopuses are probably colorblind, but they don't 'see' with their arms.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Octopus blood is blue because it carries oxygen using a copper-based protein called hemocyanin rather than iron-based hemoglobin.

      TRUE — copper turns the oxygen-carrying protein blue, which works better than iron in cold, low-oxygen water.

  3. Round 3 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Sourdough bread rises using wild yeast and bacteria naturally present in a flour-and-water starter.

      TRUE. A sourdough starter cultures wild yeast and lactic bacteria that leaven the dough and add tang.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Ancient Egyptians are commonly credited with advancing leavened bread thousands of years ago.

      TRUE. Egypt is widely associated with early progress in raised, leavened bread and its baking.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      French law dating to the reign of Louis XIV requires every baguette to be exactly 65 centimeters long.

      FALSE. No such Louis XIV law exists; the modern baguette is a 20th-century form, and its size is convention, not royal decree.

  4. Round 4 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.

  5. Round 5 FOOD
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      White chocolate counts as true chocolate because it contains roasted cocoa solids just like dark chocolate.

      FALSE. White chocolate contains cocoa butter but no cocoa solids, which is why it lacks the brown color and 'chocolatey' taste.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Cacao was consumed as a bitter, often frothy drink in Mesoamerica long before sweetened chocolate existed.

      TRUE. Mesoamerican peoples drank spiced, unsweetened, frothed cacao; sugar-sweetened chocolate came after European contact.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Solid eating chocolate as we know it emerged in the 19th century after ways to work with cocoa butter developed.

      TRUE. Advances in pressing and recombining cocoa butter in the 1800s made moldable eating chocolate possible.

  6. Round 6 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Wright brothers made the first sustained, powered, controlled airplane flights in 1903 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.

      TRUE — their December 1903 flights are recognized as the first of their kind.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Before building aircraft, the Wright brothers ran a bicycle sales and repair shop in Dayton, Ohio.

      TRUE — their bicycle business funded and informed their aeronautical experiments.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Wright brothers' very first flight lasted well over an hour and covered more than thirty miles.

      FALSE — the first flight lasted about twelve seconds and covered roughly 120 feet, not miles.

  7. Round 7 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Blue whales hunt by chasing down and swallowing large fish and seals, using bursts of speed to catch them.

      FALSE. They are filter feeders that engulf huge mouthfuls of water and strain out tiny krill with baleen.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The blue whale is the largest animal known to have ever lived, outweighing every dinosaur on record.

      TRUE. At up to about 180 tonnes, the blue whale exceeds any known dinosaur in mass.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A blue whale's heart is roughly the size of a small car, and its tongue alone can weigh about as much as an elephant.

      TRUE. The heart weighs hundreds of kilograms, and the tongue's mass approaches that of an elephant.

  8. Round 8 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Jupiter's Great Red Spot is a colossal storm that has been observed raging for at least a couple of centuries.

      TRUE. This anticyclone is wide enough to swallow Earth and has persisted through generations of observation.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Jupiter is so massive that the balance point it shares with the Sun lies just outside the Sun's surface.

      TRUE. The Sun and Jupiter orbit a common center of mass that sits slightly above the Sun's visible edge.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Jupiter has exactly four moons, all of them discovered by Galileo Galilei in 1610.

      FALSE. Galileo found the four largest moons, but Jupiter is now known to have dozens more, over ninety in total.

  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 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A foraging honeybee tells hivemates where flowers are with a 'waggle dance' whose angle and length encode direction and distance.

      TRUE — the dance's tilt relative to vertical signals bearing to the Sun, and its duration signals how far to fly.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Honeybees can be trained to recognize individual human faces by learning to combine facial features.

      TRUE — despite tiny brains, bees learn to tell faces apart using a feature-combining strategy.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Honeybees never sleep; they work in continuous shifts inside the hive until they die.

      FALSE — honeybees do sleep, resting with lowered muscle tone and drooping antennae, and sleep loss impairs their dance signaling.

← 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.