Case File #0086

Sep 15, 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 Great Pyramid of Giza remained the tallest human-made structure on Earth for thousands of years.

      TRUE — it held the record until medieval cathedrals finally rose higher.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The pyramids at Giza were originally sheathed in a smooth layer of gold plating that was later stripped away by looters.

      FALSE — the pyramids were cased in polished white limestone, not gold; the casing stones were reused for other buildings.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Great Pyramid was built as a monumental tomb for the pharaoh Khufu of the Fourth Dynasty.

      TRUE — it was raised as Khufu's royal tomb during Egypt's Old Kingdom.

  2. Round 2 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Obsidian is a natural volcanic glass that forms when lava cools so quickly that mineral crystals have no time to grow.

      TRUE — the near-instant cooling locks the material into a glassy, non-crystalline state.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Molten rock is called magma once it reaches the surface, and lava while it is still underground.

      FALSE — it's the reverse: molten rock is magma underground and lava once it erupts onto the surface.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Measured from its base on the ocean floor to its peak, Mauna Kea in Hawaii is taller than Mount Everest.

      TRUE — base-to-summit it exceeds 10,000 m, beating Everest, which is merely the highest point above sea level.

  3. Round 3 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The dot placed above a lowercase 'i' and 'j' has its own name: it is called a 'tittle'.

      TRUE. 'Tittle' means a tiny mark, and it survives in the phrase 'jot and tittle'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Hawaiian alphabet is one of the world's shortest, using only about thirteen letters in total.

      TRUE. It has five vowels and eight consonants (counting the glottal-stop okina), so many sounds are spelled with very few letters.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The symbol '&' is called the ampersand, a name taken from a Parisian printer, Andre Amper, who introduced it into French type in the 1730s.

      FALSE. 'Ampersand' is a slurring of the schoolroom phrase 'and per se and', once recited at the end of the alphabet; no printer named Amper is involved.

  4. Round 4 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The 'mare' in 'nightmare' comes from an old word for a malicious spirit believed to sit on a sleeper's chest, not from the word for a female horse.

      TRUE. The 'mare' was an incubus-like demon; the horse meaning is unrelated coincidence.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'disaster' comes from roots meaning 'bad star', reflecting an old belief that misfortune flowed from unfavourable star positions.

      TRUE. It joins a negative prefix with a word for 'star', an astrological idea of ill-fated alignments.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'news' is an acronym formed from the four compass directions: North, East, West and South.

      FALSE. 'News' is simply the plural of 'new' (new things); the tidy compass-directions story is a myth.

  5. Round 5 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Radio waves, visible light, and X-rays are all electromagnetic radiation, differing only in wavelength.

      TRUE. They sit on the same spectrum; only their wavelength and energy set them apart.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The green flash sometimes seen at sunset happens when seawater reflects a burst of green light into the sky.

      FALSE. The green flash is caused by the atmosphere bending and splitting sunlight, not by the sea reflecting light.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The sky looks blue because air molecules scatter short blue wavelengths of sunlight more than red ones.

      TRUE. Blue light scatters more strongly in all directions, so the daytime sky appears blue.

  6. Round 6 SCIENCE
    • ✓ TRUE

      The first computer 'bug' was reportedly an actual moth found stuck in a relay of an early computer in 1947.

      TRUE. A real moth was taped into the logbook of the Harvard Mark II, popularizing the term.

    • ✓ TRUE

      An early IBM commercial disk drive from the 1950s stored only about 5 megabytes yet weighed over a ton.

      TRUE. The IBM RAMAC held around 5 MB across huge spinning platters and was enormous by today's standards.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The QWERTY keyboard layout was carefully designed to let typists type as fast as humanly possible.

      FALSE. QWERTY was arranged to reduce typebar jams on early typewriters, not to maximize typing speed.

  7. Round 7 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Earthworms breathe through their skin, which must stay moist for oxygen to pass through.

      TRUE. They have no lungs; gas exchange happens across their damp skin.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Earthworms have no eyes but can sense light through specialised cells in their skin, which is why they avoid the surface in daylight.

      TRUE. Light-sensitive cells let them detect and avoid bright conditions.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Cutting an earthworm in half reliably produces two healthy worms, because both halves grow complete new bodies.

      FALSE. Usually only the front half survives and regenerates a tail; the tail half cannot regrow the vital head end.

  8. Round 8 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Frogs have no teeth at all and crush their prey with strong muscular lips before swallowing.

      FALSE — most frogs do have small teeth on the upper jaw, and many use their retracting eyeballs, not their lips, to help push food down.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Some wood frogs survive winter by letting much of their body freeze nearly solid, then thawing back to life in spring.

      TRUE — they flood their tissues with natural antifreeze-like sugars, stop their heart, and revive when they thaw.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A frog's tongue is attached at the front of its mouth, letting it flip far outward to snatch insects.

      TRUE — the front-hinged tongue can be launched forward much farther than a rear-anchored one could.

  9. Round 9 LANGUAGE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Esperanto is a constructed international language created in the late nineteenth century to be easy to learn as a neutral second language.

      TRUE. It was published in 1887 with regular grammar and roots drawn largely from European languages.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'quiz' was invented overnight in 1791 by a Dublin theatre owner named Daly, who bet he could coin a meaningless word and spread it across the city.

      FALSE. The Daly wager is an unsubstantiated anecdote; 'quiz' appears in use in senses that predate 1791, so the invention story does not hold.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A famously long English word, 'pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis', was coined to name a lung disease caused by inhaling fine dust.

      TRUE. It is a deliberately constructed term for a silica-dust lung condition and appears in some dictionaries.

  10. Round 10 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Canada is the world's second-largest country by area and shares land borders with three different nations.

      FALSE. Canada is second-largest, but its only land border is with the United States.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Russia is the world's largest country by land area and stretches across eleven time zones.

      TRUE. Russia is by far the biggest country and spans eleven time zones.

    • ✓ TRUE

      China and India are the two most populous countries in the world.

      TRUE. India and China are the world's two most populous nations, each above a billion people.

← 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.