Case File #0087

Sep 16, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Goldfish can be taught to recognise feeding times and to nudge a lever or target to earn food.

      TRUE. Goldfish learn feeding schedules and can be trained with simple lever or colour tasks.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A goldfish has a memory span of only about three seconds, so it experiences its bowl as brand new on every lap.

      FALSE. Goldfish remember for weeks or months and can be trained to respond to cues, times and simple tasks.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Goldfish belong to the carp family and, cared for well, can live for well over a decade.

      TRUE. Goldfish are cyprinids (carp relatives) and routinely live 10-15 years or more in good conditions.

  2. Round 2 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Johannes Gutenberg popularized printing with movable metal type in Europe around the 1450s, transforming how books were made.

      TRUE — his press made mass book production feasible and helped spark the print revolution.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Movable-type printing was unknown anywhere in Asia until European traders introduced Gutenberg's press in the 1500s.

      FALSE — movable type existed in China by the 11th century and metal type in Korea before Gutenberg was even born.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Gutenberg's most celebrated printed work was an edition of the Bible produced in the 1450s.

      TRUE — the Gutenberg Bible is among the earliest major books printed with movable type in Europe.

  3. Round 3 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      The croissant's crescent shape is often linked to Vienna's kipferl pastry rather than to an original French invention.

      TRUE. The crescent kipferl is a Viennese ancestor; the croissant is part of 'viennoiserie,' pastries in the Vienna style.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Layering dough with sheets of butter, called lamination, is what gives the croissant its flaky texture.

      TRUE. Rolling and folding butter into dough creates many thin layers that steam apart into flakes when baked.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The modern flaky, laminated butter croissant appears in French bakery guild records dating to the 1600s.

      FALSE. The laminated yeast-dough croissant is an early-20th-century development; no 1600s French guild recipe describes it.

  4. Round 4 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      Hummingbirds can hover in place and are the only birds capable of sustained backward flight.

      TRUE — their figure-eight wingstroke generates lift on both the forward and backward sweep, enabling true backward flight.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Tiny hummingbirds survive long migrations by riding on the backs of larger geese for part of the journey.

      FALSE — this is an old folk myth; hummingbirds fly entirely under their own power, and ruby-throated ones cross the Gulf of Mexico nonstop.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A hummingbird's heart can beat more than 1,000 times per minute during vigorous activity.

      TRUE — heart rates well over 1,000 beats per minute support their extreme metabolism.

  5. Round 5 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Titanic sank in April 1912 after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic during its very first voyage.

      TRUE — the ship went down on its maiden voyage from Southampton toward New York.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Titanic actually carried enough lifeboats for everyone aboard, but panic stopped most of them from being launched.

      FALSE — the Titanic carried lifeboats for only about half those aboard, a shortfall that worsened the death toll.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The wreck of the Titanic lay undiscovered on the ocean floor until an expedition located it in 1985.

      TRUE — a team led by Robert Ballard found the wreck deep in the Atlantic in 1985.

  6. Round 6 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter is so tightly packed that spacecraft must carefully weave through to avoid collisions.

      FALSE. The belt is mostly empty space; probes fly through it routinely with essentially no risk of hitting anything.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, is officially classified as a dwarf planet.

      TRUE. Big enough to be rounded by its own gravity, Ceres shares the dwarf planet label with Pluto.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Most of the total mass of the asteroid belt is concentrated in just a handful of its largest bodies.

      TRUE. A few big objects like Ceres and Vesta account for a large share of the belt's mass.

  7. Round 7 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Saturn is the only planet in the solar system that has a ring system around it.

      FALSE. Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune all have rings too; Saturn's are just far brighter and easier to see.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Saturn's average density is so low that, given a big enough ocean, the planet would float in water.

      TRUE. Saturn's mean density is less than that of water, the only planet for which this is the case.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Saturn's moon Titan has surface lakes and rivers filled with liquid methane and ethane instead of water.

      TRUE. Titan is the only other world known to have stable liquid on its surface, though it's hydrocarbons.

  8. Round 8 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the Sun at about four light-years, is bright enough to spot with the naked eye.

      FALSE. Proxima Centauri is a dim red dwarf, far too faint to see without a telescope despite being closest.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Hubble Space Telescope orbits Earth and has been returning astronomical observations since 1990.

      TRUE. Launched aboard the shuttle in 1990, it has been serviced by astronauts and still operates.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A light-year measures distance, not time — specifically how far light travels over the course of one year.

      TRUE. Despite the word 'year,' it's a unit of distance, roughly 9.5 trillion kilometers.

  9. Round 9 HISTORY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The ancient Maya predicted the world would end in 2012, which is exactly why their long calendar simply stops there.

      FALSE — the Maya predicted no apocalypse; 2012 merely closed one long-count cycle, and the calendar rolls onward.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Maya civilization developed a full writing system and strikingly accurate calendars across Mesoamerica.

      TRUE — Maya scribes recorded history in glyphs and tracked astronomical cycles precisely.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Maya cities such as Tikal featured towering stone pyramids, temples, and palaces rising above the forest.

      TRUE — Tikal's stepped pyramids still loom over the Guatemalan jungle.

  10. Round 10 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Bamboo flowers and produces seeds every single year, just like most common garden plants.

      FALSE. Many bamboo species flower only once every several decades, sometimes in synchronised events across entire regions.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Some bamboo species can grow nearly a metre in a single day, making them among the fastest-growing plants on Earth.

      TRUE. Certain species set growth records of close to a metre per day under ideal conditions.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Bamboo is technically a grass, closely related to wheat, rice and lawn grasses.

      TRUE. Despite its woody, tree-like size, bamboo belongs to the grass family Poaceae.

← 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.