Case File #0089

Sep 18, 2026 — 10 rounds, declassified. The fabrication in each is marked; the truth of all three follows. Play today's case →

  1. Round 1 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A firefly's light is produced by a chemical reaction that gives off almost no heat, making it one of the most efficient lights known.

      TRUE. Unlike a light bulb, nearly all the energy becomes light rather than heat.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A firefly's glow is produced by friction as it rubs its wings together, much like striking a match.

      FALSE. The light comes from a chemical reaction (luciferin and luciferase) in its abdomen, not friction.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Each firefly species flashes in its own distinctive pattern, helping males and females of the same species find one another.

      TRUE. Flash patterns are species-specific mating signals.

  2. Round 2 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Greenland is the world's largest island that is not classified as a continent.

      TRUE. Greenland is the biggest island on Earth that isn't a continent.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Australia is officially classified as the world's largest island rather than as a continent.

      FALSE. Australia is considered a continent, not an island; Greenland is the largest island.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Indonesia is an archipelago made up of many thousands of separate islands.

      TRUE. Indonesia consists of thousands of islands spread across the equator.

  3. Round 3 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      Honey is so low in moisture and naturally acidic that it resists spoiling, and sealed honey found in ancient tombs has remained edible.

      TRUE. Its low water content and acidity prevent most microbes from growing, so it can last essentially indefinitely.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      If honey crystallises and turns grainy in the jar, it has spoiled and should be thrown away.

      FALSE. Crystallisation is a normal, harmless process; gently warming the jar returns the honey to a liquid.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Honeybees make honey by repeatedly passing nectar between workers and fanning it with their wings to evaporate water.

      TRUE. The process concentrates nectar into the thick, shelf-stable syrup we call honey.

  4. Round 4 SCIENCE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Lightning never strikes the same spot twice, because each discharge permanently ruins the air's ability to conduct there.

      FALSE. Lightning frequently hits the same place; tall structures get struck many times every year.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The Empire State Building is hit by lightning roughly 20 to 25 times per year.

      TRUE. Its height makes it a favorite lightning target, struck around two dozen times annually.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Thunder is the sound of air violently expanding after being superheated by a lightning bolt.

      TRUE. The bolt heats air explosively, and the rapid expansion creates the shockwave we hear as thunder.

  5. Round 5 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Turkey's capital is Istanbul, the country's largest city, which uniquely straddles two continents.

      FALSE. Turkey's capital is Ankara. Istanbul is the largest city and does span two continents, but it isn't the capital.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Canada's capital is Ottawa, a city selected as the seat of government by Queen Victoria in the 1850s.

      TRUE. Queen Victoria picked Ottawa as capital in 1857, a compromise between English and French Canada.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Istanbul sits on both the European and Asian sides of the Bosphorus strait.

      TRUE. The Bosphorus splits the city, so Istanbul genuinely lies on two continents.

  6. Round 6 GEOGRAPHY
    • ✓ TRUE

      Angel Falls in Venezuela is the world's tallest uninterrupted waterfall.

      TRUE. Angel Falls has the highest uninterrupted drop of any waterfall, near 979 metres.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Niagara Falls lies on the border between the United States and Canada.

      TRUE. Niagara Falls straddles the U.S.-Canada border between Ontario and New York.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Niagara Falls is the tallest waterfall in the world, with a drop of more than 800 metres.

      FALSE. Niagara is only about 50 metres tall; the tallest waterfall is Angel Falls.

  7. Round 7 FOOD
    • ✓ TRUE

      Pineapples are native to South America and were encountered by Europeans in the Caribbean in the late 15th century.

      TRUE. The pineapple originated in South America and Europeans first met it during Caribbean voyages around 1493.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      The pineapple got its English name because early botanists placed it in the same plant family as pine trees.

      FALSE. It was named for looking like a pine cone; the pineapple is a bromeliad and unrelated to pine trees.

    • ✓ TRUE

      In 18th-century Europe, pineapples were rare luxuries and were sometimes rented out as dinner-table centerpieces.

      TRUE. Pineapples were so costly that hosts displayed, and even rented, them as status symbols rather than eating them.

  8. Round 8 SPACE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Black holes act as cosmic vacuum cleaners, actively pulling in any matter within several light-years of them.

      FALSE. A black hole's gravity behaves like any other mass; you could orbit one safely from a distance, as planets orbit stars.

    • ✓ TRUE

      The first direct image of a black hole's shadow was released in 2019, showing the giant one in galaxy M87.

      TRUE. The Event Horizon Telescope combined dishes worldwide to capture the glowing ring around it.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Not even light can escape from within a black hole's event horizon, the boundary of no return.

      TRUE. Past that boundary, escape velocity exceeds the speed of light, so nothing gets back out.

  9. Round 9 NATURE
    • ✓ TRUE

      A 'shooting star' is not a star at all but a small piece of space rock or dust burning up high in the atmosphere.

      TRUE. The streak of light is a meteor — a meteoroid heated to incandescence by friction with the air.

    • ✗ FABRICATION

      Shooting stars are real stars falling out of the sky, and each one leaves a gap in the night sky where the star used to be.

      FALSE. The stars remain in place; what falls is a tiny meteoroid burning up, far closer than any star.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Most meteors that create a visible streak are tiny, often no larger than a grain of sand.

      TRUE. Even a dust-sized particle can produce a bright flash as it vaporises.

  10. Round 10 NATURE
    • ✗ FABRICATION

      A glacier is a solid, motionless sheet of ice that never moves or changes within a human lifetime.

      FALSE. Glaciers flow continuously, and many advance or retreat measurably within years.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Glaciers hold most of the world's fresh water, far more than all the rivers and lakes combined.

      TRUE. Ice sheets and glaciers lock up the majority of Earth's fresh water.

    • ✓ TRUE

      Glaciers are slow rivers of ice that flow downhill under their own weight, carving and reshaping valleys as they move.

      TRUE. Despite looking solid, glacial ice deforms and creeps downhill over years.

← 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.