About the game
"Florida Man" is an internet folk hero: the anonymous protagonist of thousands of local news stories that start with the words Florida man and end somewhere nobody expected. The stories are real, they are documented by newspapers and TV stations across the state, and after a few hundred of them it becomes genuinely hard to tell what actually happened from what someone made up.
That is the whole game. Each round shows two headlines. One of them was published by a real news outlet; the other was written to sound exactly like it. You pick the one you think is real, we tell you whether you were right, link the original article, and show what share of players got it right.
Two ways to play
- Daily — five pairs, the same for everyone in the world, refreshed at 00:00 UTC. One attempt per day, a streak counter for consecutive days, and a spoiler-free result you can share as 🐊🦩 emoji.
- Endless — random pairs until your first mistake. Your best streak is saved in your browser.
Where the real headlines come from
Real headlines are collected from the r/FloridaMan community and from news search feeds. We keep only link posts to actual news articles, drop anything that is a question, a video or a meme, and automatically check that the article is still online — when it is not, we link the Internet Archive copy instead. Every real headline in the game links to its source, and past daily sets are listed in the archive.
Not every real story belongs in a light-hearted game. Headlines involving death, serious violence, sexual content, minors, hate or partisan politics are filtered out by an automated review and never shown.
Where the fake headlines come from
The fake ones are written by a language model that is shown a sample of real headlines on the same topic (alligators, Walmart, boats, bad decisions with motor vehicles…) and asked to match their length, tone and quirks. A second pass acts as a judge and rejects anything that is obviously invented, describes a real event, or names a real person. The fakes are fiction: they do not describe real people, companies or places smaller than a city.
How difficulty is tuned
Every pair keeps a running score of how many players answered it and how many were right. Pairs that turn out to be too easy (more than 90 % correct after a couple of hundred answers) are retired, and the daily set prefers pairs that land in the 40–75 % range — hard enough to be fun, not so hard that it feels random. A real headline is never reused in the daily challenge within 60 days.
Privacy in one sentence
There are no accounts and no cookies; your progress and streaks live in your browser's local storage, and the only thing sent to our servers is your answer to a pair. Details are in the privacy policy.