Baloney is a free daily lie-detection game. Each of ten rounds shows three short statements on one topic — exactly one is a plausible fabrication. You tap the fake before the timer, then every statement is revealed as true or false with a one-line truth, and you earn a shareable Baloney Detector verdict from 'Believes Everything' to 'Baloney Immune'. No account, no sign-up.

How do you play Baloney?

Open the site, read the three statements in each round, and tap the one you think is fabricated before the ~30-second timer runs out. After each round the fake is revealed along with the truth of all three statements, plus what percent of today's players got fooled. You win by smell, not recall — no trivia knowledge required.

Yes. Baloney is completely free and ad-supported, with no account, no sign-up, and nothing to install. A new set of ten rounds is released every day and is the same for everyone that day; your streak is saved in your browser.

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 →

Round 1 HISTORY
- ✗ 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 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.
- ✓ 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.
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.
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.
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.
- ✗ 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.
- ✓ 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.
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.
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.
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.
Round 8 ANIMALS
- ✓ 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.
- ✗ 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.
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.
- ✓ 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.
- ✗ 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.
Round 10 GEOGRAPHY
- ✓ 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.
- ✗ 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
  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.

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