Case File #0085

Sep 14, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A flame's color hints at its temperature, with blue flames generally hotter than orange or yellow ones.

      TRUE. Bluer flames indicate more complete, hotter combustion than yellow-orange ones.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Water extinguishes fire mainly by being heavier than the flames and physically pushing them downward.

      FALSE. Water works by cooling the fuel below ignition and by steam crowding out oxygen, not by weight.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Fire needs three things at once: oxygen, fuel, and heat, and removing any one will put it out.

      TRUE. This is the fire triangle; take away any side and combustion stops.

  2. Round 2 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A platypus's bill is a hard beak of solid bone, like a bird's, which it uses to crack open nuts.

      FALSE. The bill is soft, rubbery and leathery, packed with electroreceptors that detect the muscle movements of prey, not a bone nutcracker.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The platypus is one of the very few mammals that lays eggs instead of giving birth to live young.

      TRUE. Along with echidnas, it is a monotreme — an egg-laying mammal.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The male platypus has a venomous spur on each hind leg, a rare feature among mammals.

      TRUE. The spur delivers a painful venom, mostly used in fights with rival males.

  3. Round 3 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Flamingos hatch grey-white and only turn pink over time from pigments in the algae and tiny crustaceans they eat.

      TRUE — carotenoid pigments in their food dye the feathers pink; a flamingo fed a plain diet fades toward white.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A flamingo can balance on one leg for only a few minutes before muscle fatigue forces it to switch legs.

      FALSE — the one-legged stance is the low-effort, near-passive posture; flamingos hold it effortlessly, even while asleep.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Flamingos feed with their heads upside down, using comb-like structures in the bill to filter small food from the water.

      TRUE — the bill works as a strainer while held inverted, sieving out algae and shrimp-like prey.

  4. Round 4 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'sincere' comes from the Latin 'sine cera', meaning 'without wax', from honest sculptors who refused to hide cracks in marble with wax filler.

      FALSE. 'Sincere' comes from Latin 'sincerus' (clean, pure, whole); the charming 'without wax' sculptor story is a well-known folk etymology with no support.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The English word 'salary' derives from the Latin 'salarium', a term connected to salt and to allowances paid to Roman soldiers.

      TRUE. Salarium linked to 'sal' (salt); the Romans tied pay to this word, which is where 'worth your salt' feeling comes from.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'ketchup' most likely traces back through Malay to a Hokkien Chinese term for a fermented fish or seafood sauce.

      TRUE. The original sauce was nothing like the tomato version; the fish-sauce ancestor travelled via Southeast Asian trade into English.

  5. Round 5 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sound cannot pass through solid steel, because its tightly packed atoms block the vibrations entirely.

      FALSE. Sound travels through steel even faster than through air, at several kilometers per second.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Sound travels roughly four times faster in water than it does in air.

      TRUE. Water's tighter molecular packing carries vibrations far quicker than air does.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In the vacuum of space, sound cannot travel because there are no molecules to carry the vibrations.

      TRUE. Sound needs a medium; with no particles to pass the vibration along, space is silent.

  6. Round 6 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Greenland is the world's largest island, though Australia is counted as a continent rather than an island.

      TRUE. By area, Greenland is the largest island; Australia is classed as a continent.

    • ✓ TRUE

      If Greenland's ice sheet melted completely, global sea levels would rise by roughly seven metres.

      TRUE. The ice sheet holds enough water to raise oceans by about seven metres.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Greenland was named for its lush, green interior, which early explorers found covered in forests.

      FALSE. Its interior is almost entirely ice; the name is traditionally credited to Erik the Red's bid to attract settlers.

  7. Round 7 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A praying mantis has ears on its head that let it hear birdsong from hundreds of metres away.

      FALSE. Most mantises have a single ear on the underside of the thorax, tuned mainly to the ultrasound of hunting bats, not birdsong.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A praying mantis is the only insect known to be able to turn its head and look over its shoulder.

      TRUE. Its flexible neck joint lets it swivel its triangular head far to the side to track movement.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A female praying mantis sometimes eats the male during or after mating.

      TRUE. Sexual cannibalism occurs in some mantis species, though it is not universal.

  8. Round 8 SPACE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A single rotation of Venus takes longer than one full trip around the Sun, so its day is longer than its year.

      TRUE. Venus spins once every 243 Earth days but orbits the Sun in about 225, so a day outlasts a year.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Venus is the only planet in the solar system that spins in the opposite direction to its orbit around the Sun.

      FALSE. Uranus also rotates in a backwards, tilted-on-its-side fashion, so Venus is not the only one.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system, even though Mercury orbits closer to the Sun.

      TRUE. Venus's thick carbon-dioxide atmosphere traps heat, pushing surface temperatures above 460 degrees Celsius.

  9. Round 9 FOOD
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Herbal 'teas' such as chamomile are made from Camellia sinensis leaves harvested before they develop caffeine.

      FALSE. Herbal infusions come from other plants entirely, not from the tea plant, and are more properly called tisanes.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Black tea and green tea come from the same plant, differing mainly in how the leaves are processed and oxidized.

      TRUE. Both come from Camellia sinensis; oxidation level during processing is what separates green from black.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Oolong tea is partially oxidized, sitting between green tea and black tea in its processing.

      TRUE. Oolong's partial oxidation places it in flavor and color between unoxidized green and fully oxidized black tea.

  10. Round 10 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Sun is classified as a red giant and currently generates its energy by fusing helium in its core.

      FALSE. The Sun is a yellow dwarf fusing hydrogen; it won't become a red giant for billions of years.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Sun contains roughly 99.8 percent of all the mass in the entire solar system.

      TRUE. Everything else, all planets and moons combined, makes up only a tiny fraction of the total.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Light leaving the Sun takes about eight minutes to travel across space and reach the Earth.

      TRUE. So the sunlight you see actually left the Sun roughly eight minutes earlier.

← 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.