Atlas of Breeds on The Gamecock Codex

American Game

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The American Game is the bird of the Southern cockpit — a blend of the Spanish gallo fino brought to the Caribbean in the sixteenth century, the English gamefowl of the colonial tidewater, and a substantial infusion of Oriental (chiefly Asil and Shamo) blood from the late nineteenth century onward.

Aseel

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Aseel (sometimes written Asil) is the bearded, muffed variant of the Indian gamefowl — close-feathered, hard-fleshed, and intensely game. The name is essentially a regional variant of the same Arabic-Hindustani word that gives us Asil, but in Western exhibition circles the two names have come to designate slightly different breeds.

Asil

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Asil is the oldest documented game breed in the world. Its name, in Arabic and Hindustani, means of pure lineage; its antiquity in the cockpit is matched only by the Persian love of the sport. The Asil is not so much a single breed as a family of related landraces, from the diminutive Reza of the Andhra country to the imposing Kulang of South India and the high-stationed Sonatol of the north.

Burmese Game

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Burmese Game is the fighting cock of Myanmar (Burma) — a large, heavily-built bird of South Asian derivation, closely related to the Asil but bred for the heavier, more decisive match typical of the Burmese pit.

Malay

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Malay is the tallest of all gamefowl breeds — a strange, almost reptilian bird with a long S-curved neck, a hawk-billed head set low on the shoulders, prominent shoulder hump, and legs that carry the body almost a metre off the ground. It was one of the first Asian breeds known in Europe and was the model from which Buffon and Aldrovandi drew their natural-history descriptions in the seventeenth century.

Modern Game

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Modern Game is the bird of the exhibition hall — bred, since about 1850, for type alone. Where the Old English Game retains the working shape of the cockpit bird, the Modern Game has been stretched, refined, exaggerated, and polished into a creature of show-bench perfection: tall, slim, long-legged, tight-feathered, narrow-bodied, fierce of eye, with a head held high and a tail carried low.

Old English Game

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Old English Game (OEG) is the bird of the British cockpit. It is, in a meaningful sense, the original gamecock of the modern Western world — the landrace from which the American, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and most Latin American gamefowl ultimately derive.

Phoenix

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Phoenix is the long-tail fowl of the European show pen — bred from imported Japanese Onagadori stock in the late nineteenth century and developed into a bird of extraordinary tail length, though not (as is often claimed) of true non-moulting tail growth.

Shamo

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Shamo is Japan’s national gamecock — and arguably the most striking silhouette in the entire gamefowl world. Tall, almost reptilian in posture, the bird stands with its head held level with its shoulder, neck arched forward, body held at a steep angle, and shoulders prominent as a vaulted cathedral. To see a Shamo cock in the morning sun is to see the avian form sculpted for one purpose: to be terrible.

Sumatra

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Sumatra is a long-tailed, beetle-black gamefowl of the Indonesian island that gives it its name — a bird of almost pheasant-like carriage, kept today for exhibition and as one of the most striking of the long-crower breeds. It is the Western showman’s nearest approach to the wild Gallus varius of Java, although it is descended in fact from fighting stock of Sumatra rather than from any wild species.

Thai Game

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Thai Game — known in Thailand as ไก่ชน (kai chon, “fighting chicken”) — is the bird of the Siamese pit, the closest living relative of the prototype that the Japanese bred into the modern Shamo.

Yokohama

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

date: 2026-06-01

The Yokohama is the European cousin of the Japanese Minohiki (蓑引き, “saddle-drooping”) — a long-tailed gamefowl developed in the late nineteenth century by German fanciers from imported Japanese stock.