Modern Game
The Victorian Aristocrat

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.

It is one of the most recognisable of all poultry breeds, and one of the most unusual — a bird that exists only because the Victorians wanted it to.

A Breed of the Crystal Palace

The Modern Game was developed in the mid-nineteenth century, in the years immediately following the founding of the first major poultry shows (Birmingham 1847, the Crystal Palace 1848). Fanciers crossed Old English Game with Malay and, it is suspected, with several other Oriental strains, selecting for extreme type rather than for working qualities. The bird was exhibited for the first time as a distinct variety in 1870, and it was admitted to the first edition of the Standard of Excellence (William Bernhard Tegetmeier, 1865).

By the 1870s, the Modern Game had developed its characteristic silhouette: a long-legged, upright, narrow-bodied bird with the smallest head possible on a gamecock frame, the longest neck, and the proudest carriage. The breed was (and is) one of the visual sensations of the poultry show — a bird that, in the words of the Field of 1870, “approaches the sublime.”

The Famous “Hen-Feathered” Variety

Among the colour varieties of the Modern Game, one is unique in poultry culture: the hen-feathered (or henny) Game, in which the cock lacks the typical sickle and tail covert feathers of the male, and is feathered almost exactly like the hen. The variety is thought to be the result of a single mutation, present since the early years of the breed; it was a particular favourite of Queen Victoria, who kept a flock at Windsor.

Conservation

The Modern Game is secure as an exhibition breed in Britain and in much of the English-speaking world. Its popularity as a show bird has waxed and waned — the breed suffered a serious decline in the mid-twentieth century as the poultry fancy contracted — but its type is firmly established and its future is, by most reckonings, secure.