Case File #0082

Sep 11, 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

      Over his lifetime Thomas Edison was granted more than a thousand United States patents.

      TRUE — his name appears on 1,093 US patents.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Thomas Edison single-handedly invented the light bulb, with no earlier inventor ever having produced an electric lamp.

      FALSE — electric lamps existed before Edison; he improved a practical, longer-lasting bulb rather than inventing the idea.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Edison developed the phonograph, one of the earliest devices able to record and play back sound.

      TRUE — his 1877 phonograph could capture and reproduce the human voice.

  2. Round 2 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Lake Baikal in Siberia is the deepest lake in the world and holds about a fifth of all unfrozen surface fresh water.

      TRUE. It plunges more than 1,600 metres and holds around 20 percent of the world's surface fresh water.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Lake Baikal is a saltwater sea connected to the ocean, which is why seals are able to live there.

      FALSE. Baikal is a freshwater lake far inland; its seals are adapted to fresh water, not an ocean connection.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Lake Baikal is so old and isolated that it hosts many species found nowhere else, including a unique freshwater seal.

      TRUE. The Baikal seal is the world's only exclusively freshwater seal.

  3. Round 3 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.

  4. Round 4 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Himalayas are still slowly rising because the Indian plate keeps pushing northward into the rest of Asia.

      TRUE — the ongoing collision continues to crumple and lift the range by millimeters each year.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Rock near Everest's summit contains the fossils of sea creatures that once lived on an ancient ocean floor.

      TRUE — the collision that raised the range lifted old seabed limestone, fossils and all, to the top of the world.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The summit of Mount Everest is dark volcanic rock, formed back when the mountain was an active volcano.

      FALSE — Everest was never a volcano; its summit is marine limestone, packed with fossils of creatures from an ancient sea floor.

  5. Round 5 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Nile lies entirely within Egypt, running from its source to its mouth without leaving the country.

      FALSE. The Nile crosses many countries; its waters gather from the Great Lakes region and Ethiopia before reaching Egypt.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Nile is one of the world's longest rivers and flows generally northward, emptying into the Mediterranean Sea.

      TRUE. Unusually, the Nile flows north and drains into the Mediterranean via its Egyptian delta.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Amazon discharges more water into the ocean than any other river on Earth.

      TRUE. By sheer volume of water discharged, the Amazon dwarfs every other river.

  6. Round 6 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A sloth moves so slowly that algae grows in its fur, giving it a greenish tint that helps it hide among leaves.

      TRUE. The algae thrives in the sloth's grooved fur and lends a green camouflage among the canopy.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Three-toed sloths climb down from their tree only about once a week, usually to defecate at the base of the trunk.

      TRUE. They make a risky weekly descent to the ground almost exclusively to relieve themselves.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      When threatened, a sloth can sprint at up to 15 kilometres an hour to outrun a predator.

      FALSE. Sloths are among the slowest mammals; on the ground they typically crawl at a fraction of a kilometre per hour.

  7. Round 7 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The letter 'e' is the most commonly used letter in written English.

      TRUE. In typical English text, 'e' appears far more often than any other letter.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      There is a single official English word that everyone agrees is the longest word in the language.

      FALSE. There is no universally agreed longest word; the answer depends on how you define a word and which dictionary you consult.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Words such as 'rhythm' and 'syzygy' contain no standard vowel letters (a, e, i, o, u) at all.

      TRUE. Both are spelled using only the letter 'y' where a vowel sound is needed.

  8. Round 8 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Spain and Portugal together make up most of the Iberian Peninsula.

      TRUE. The Iberian Peninsula is shared mainly by Spain and Portugal.

    • ✓ TRUE

      France borders many more countries than Portugal does, including Spain, Italy, and Germany.

      TRUE. France shares land borders with numerous nations, among them Spain, Italy, and Germany.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Portugal shares land borders with both Spain and France on the European mainland.

      FALSE. Portugal's only land border is with Spain; it does not touch France.

  9. Round 9 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Coffee's use as a brewed drink is strongly associated with its early spread through the Arabian Peninsula.

      TRUE. Brewed coffee culture took strong early root in Arabia, spreading through its ports and cities.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Espresso is made from a special species of coffee bean that is grown only at high altitudes in Italy.

      FALSE. Espresso is a brewing method using pressurized hot water; it is not a bean, and coffee is not commercially grown in Italy.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Coffee 'beans' are actually the seeds found inside the fruit of the coffee plant, often called cherries.

      TRUE. Each coffee 'bean' is a seed from inside a small red fruit, so 'bean' is really a seed.

  10. Round 10 HISTORY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Joan of Arc led French forces to victory and was afterward crowned Queen of France in gratitude.

      FALSE — Joan was never queen; she was captured, tried, and burned at the stake in 1431.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Hundred Years' War between England and France actually ran longer than a century, from 1337 to 1453.

      TRUE — the conflict spanned 116 years of intermittent fighting.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Joan of Arc played a decisive role in lifting the English siege of Orléans in 1429.

      TRUE — her leadership at Orléans marked a turning point for the French cause.

← 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.