It’s around 11 p.m., probably too late to hit the sauce if you haven’t started. What are you and three to five of your closest friends going to do? You want to play the crying game. Take that moment of boredom and transform it into a socially castrating test of emotional control.

What the hell is the crying game? I’m not talking about the movie, or the song — I’m talking about the actual game. The original idea came from McSweeney’s DVD magazine “Wholphin,” and it’s really quite simple: Sit around a table with a few other people (two is awkward, more than six is near impossible) and the first person to put an actual tear on the table wins. It has to actually hit the table, and no, you can’t use your hand to transfer it. That little lugubrious bead of victory has to roll all the way off your face.

While this could all be dismissed as a neo-emo exercise in self-loathing and general melancholy, once you actually sit down to give it a go, many interesting tendencies become apparent about the people with whom you are playing. There is a vast spectrum of strategies, each catering to the strengths and weaknesses of individual players.

For example, a strategy of visual people is to throw their hands over their eyes and rock back and forth, retreating into the gloomiest recesses of their minds. Some will also moan slightly. Store this in appropriate ridicule banks for later use. These people, when fully drawn into that inner unhappy place, conjure up obscure, heartbreaking images of historical tragedies, visions of family members meeting various and unpleasant ends, as well as worst-case scenarios involving gin, tai chi and more than a few surgical clamps.

Still others will open their eyes as wide as possible and hope that not blinking will do the trick. This is an amateur mistake, although it is particularly haunting to look into someone’s eyes as they plumb the depths of their emotionally constipated souls for anything sad enough to push them over the edge. These are the same people who are also pinching themselves under the table.

A few players will claim that in the build up to an actual round they came fairly close to breaking down, but once the pressure was on, all teary tendencies went MIA. This is fairly common, especially because few people realize how hard it is to jump over that boo-hoo barrier on purpose.

During my first round of the Crying Game (or CG, to pros) over winter break, an ex-football player friend from home developed a devastating strategy: He laughed so hard he cried. It’s brilliant for several reasons. Not only did he avoid being totally emasculated by getting all weepy in mixed company, but his incessant blue-in-the-face chortles completely took everyone else out of the game. Who can legitimately cry when faced with some chucklehead’s epic twitters?

If you go for a few rounds, experiment with different music. After really going with the lamest emo music you can find for a while — and trust me, it gets old — dig deep into those iTunes archives. What really awakens that emotionally tender side of you? I can tell you nothing makes me feel like a sentimental fawn like some Alanis Morissette circa “Jagged Little Pill.” Ironic, I know. For an extra challenge, throw on 50-Cent or “The Crying Game” by Boy George.

The crying game can be a profound experience in a very humanizing way. The whole episode (short of guffawing the tears out) can cut through a lot of emotional veneers that people construct around themselves in social situations. There’s the initial “ready, go,” followed by a few inevitable rounds of giggles, but once people really hunker down and get to it, things get interesting quickly.

But be sure to exercise caution. Prompting guests to conjure up macabre images of drunken surgical clamping can really kill the mood.