Case File #0088

Sep 17, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      As iron rusts, it slowly loses weight because the metal flakes away into lighter oxide dust.

      FALSE. Rusting adds oxygen from the air, so a rusted piece of iron actually weighs more than before.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Stainless steel resists rust because its chromium forms an invisible, self-repairing oxide layer on the surface.

      TRUE. That thin chromium-oxide film reforms when scratched, keeping the steel protected.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Gold is so chemically unreactive that it barely tarnishes, which is why ancient gold artifacts still gleam.

      TRUE. Gold resists reacting with oxygen and most acids, so it keeps its shine for millennia.

  2. Round 2 HISTORY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Christopher Columbus completed his first transatlantic crossing in 1492, reaching islands in the Caribbean.

      TRUE — he made landfall in the Bahamas that October, opening sustained European contact with the Americas.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Columbus mainly sailed west to prove the Earth was round, a fact nearly all educated Europeans of his day denied.

      FALSE — educated Europeans already knew the Earth was round; the real dispute was how far away Asia was.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Columbus believed to the end that he had reached the outskirts of Asia rather than a new continent.

      TRUE — he insisted he had found a route to the Indies, not an unknown landmass.

  3. Round 3 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      There is evidence of pasta-like foods in Italy before Marco Polo's travels, undercutting the story that he introduced it.

      TRUE. Records show pasta in Italy predating Marco Polo, so he could not have brought the first noodles home.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Dried durum-wheat pasta was being produced in medieval Sicily, helping it spread around the Mediterranean.

      TRUE. Medieval Sicily was an early hub of dried pasta production, aiding trade and its wider spread.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Marco Polo brought the first noodles to Italy from China, which is why Italians began making pasta.

      FALSE. This is a popular myth; pasta already existed in Italy before Marco Polo's journey to Asia.

  4. Round 4 ANIMALS
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Dolphins are fish and breathe underwater through gills, like other marine animals.

      FALSE. Dolphins are air-breathing mammals that must surface to breathe through a blowhole, not gills.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A dolphin sleeps with one half of its brain at a time, keeping one eye open and surfacing to breathe.

      TRUE. This 'unihemispheric' sleep lets it rest while staying alert enough to surface for air.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Dolphins use signature whistles that act like individual names, identifying themselves and calling to specific others.

      TRUE. Each dolphin develops a personal whistle others use to address it.

  5. Round 5 ANIMALS
    • ✓ TRUE

      A kangaroo is a marsupial whose newborn is born tiny and hairless, then finishes growing inside the mother's pouch.

      TRUE. The joey is roughly bean-sized at birth and crawls to the pouch to develop further.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A kangaroo's tail is a simple, muscle-free counterweight used only for balance while standing still.

      FALSE. The tail is heavily muscled and acts like a fifth limb, pushing the body forward while the kangaroo walks slowly.

    • ✓ TRUE

      A kangaroo cannot move its hind legs independently on land, so it is unable to hop or walk backwards.

      TRUE. Its large tail and the way its legs work together make backward motion effectively impossible.

  6. Round 6 LANGUAGE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The word 'gospel' comes from an Old English term meaning 'God's spell', that is, a divine incantation or magic saying.

      FALSE. It comes from Old English 'godspel' meaning 'good news' (god 'good' + spel 'story'), a translation of the Greek for good tidings, not 'God's spell'.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'clue' comes from 'clew', meaning a ball of thread, echoing the thread a hero unwound to find his way out of a labyrinth.

      TRUE. Following a thread to solve a maze gave 'clew/clue' its sense of something that guides you to a solution.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The word 'malaria' comes from an Italian phrase meaning 'bad air', from the belief that the disease rose from foul marsh vapours.

      TRUE. Before mosquitoes were understood, people blamed swampy 'bad air' for the fever.

  7. Round 7 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sugar dissolves faster in cold water than hot, because cold water molecules grip the sugar more tightly.

      FALSE. Sugar dissolves faster in hot water; the added heat gives molecules more energy to break the sugar apart.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Stirring a solution speeds up dissolving by bringing fresh solvent into contact with the solid.

      TRUE. Stirring sweeps away saturated liquid at the surface, letting more solid dissolve.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Carbonated drinks fizz more when warm, because gases dissolve less easily in liquids at higher temperatures.

      TRUE. Warmth drives dissolved carbon dioxide out of solution, so warm soda foams more.

  8. Round 8 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Caesar salad is generally credited to a restaurateur working in Tijuana, Mexico, in the 1920s.

      TRUE. The dish is widely traced to a Tijuana restaurant kitchen in the 1920s, near the U.S. border.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The classic dressing is built from ingredients such as garlic, lemon, egg, and Parmesan cheese.

      TRUE. Emulsified egg, lemon, garlic, oil, and Parmesan form the backbone of the traditional dressing.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The Caesar salad was named after the Roman emperor Julius Caesar, whose banquets featured an early version of it.

      FALSE. It is named for restaurateur Caesar Cardini, not the Roman emperor, and dates to the 20th century.

  9. Round 9 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      The Maillard reaction is a reaction between amino acids and reducing sugars that produces browning and new flavors.

      TRUE. This heat-driven reaction creates the savory flavors and brown color of roasted, seared, and baked foods.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Caramelization involves the breakdown of sugars alone and generally begins at higher temperatures than many Maillard reactions.

      TRUE. Caramelization is pure sugar breakdown and typically needs higher heat than protein-plus-sugar browning.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The browning of a seared steak is caused mainly by caramelization of the meat's own natural sugars.

      FALSE. Meat browning is mostly the Maillard reaction between amino acids and sugars; caramelization is a separate sugar-only process.

  10. Round 10 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      The potato was domesticated in the Andes region of South America thousands of years ago.

      TRUE. Andean peoples domesticated the potato millennia ago, developing many varieties suited to high altitudes.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Potatoes reached Europe in the 16th century and were initially met with suspicion in some regions.

      TRUE. After arriving from the Americas, potatoes were long distrusted in parts of Europe before becoming a staple.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Sweet potatoes and regular potatoes are closely related and belong to the very same plant family.

      FALSE. They are not close relatives: the potato is a nightshade, while the sweet potato is in the morning-glory family.

← 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.