Ranger Rick said:
The great game was played in the 40s and 50s. I do not recall much being said about it past the Ciemian war.
After the end of the first Afghan war and the Mutiny, the British would not officially allow their agents into the areas beyond the Indian frontier. However, it still happened anyway.
During this time, the Russian Empire extended its control over Kiva, Samarkand, Bukhara and Tashkent, and began looking for passes from which to enter India from the Tien Shan - the latter was ruled by a bandit-warlord at the time who'd effectively thrown the Chinese out of their province, and he played the Russians against the British, who acted primarily through their secret service (which inspired Kipling's
Kim).
By the 1870s the Russians were once again reaching out toward Afghanistan, and both the Russians and British had explorers, cartographers, and spies active throughout the region - the second Afghan war was fought during this period, both sides were active in the Himalaya and the Karakoram scouting routes and scheming through local warlords. This activity continued all the way into the first decade of the twentieth century when the borders of Afghanistan were finally settled by joint agreement.
The game I would run would begin during the time that the British Empire has officially ended its missions into the region, sometime during the late 1860s or early 1870s, as the Russians were consolidating their gains in central Asia and sending out feelers through the Karakoram to look for a way to enter the Punjab. Starved for intelligence of Russian moves, a secret mission is contemplated by the viceroy from his palace in Calcutta...
So yes, the Great Game continued well past the 1850s.
