Castello

Castello is a 1965 game by Carl Renström, published at Brio.

The game is played on a 21x15 board, with the following setup:

Each player has 30 pieces. There are also eleven castles.

Rules:

• On her turn, the player picks a friendly piece and either:
• moves it to an orthogonal or diagonal adjacent empty square
• in the piece's first move, it can move two steps
• jumps over a piece (of either color) -- not castles --, landing on the immediate next cell that must be empty
• any jumped enemy piece is captured
• jumps can be multiple and make turns in different directions
• friendly pieces can be jumped over more than once in a jumping sequence
• the jumping piece cannot return to its initial square before the jump sequence
• only a maximum of five captures are allowed
• A castle is captured by a player if it is orthogonally adjacent to three of her pieces 
• However, players cannot capture the four castles near their home rows
• The three central castles may not be captured until one of the four farthest castles are captured
• Wins the player that captures four castles or 28 enemy pieces

From Mats Winther's page:

This game is very good and remarkably similar to a medieval battle situation.

Castello was designed by Carl Renström. It was first published by BRIO in 1965. BRIO was founded in 1884 in Osby, a small town located in southern Sweden. Today, the small family-run business has grown into the global company BRIO AB, with subsidiaries in Germany, France and Japan and distributors around the world. BRIO’s product portfolio currently consists of numerous toys but also games for the whole family under the brand Alga. BRIO has been a Purveyor to the Royal Court of Sweden since the 1940s. Today, BRIO is owned by Ravensburger.

In the original rules, the Soldier can both step and jump in the eight directions. But eight freedoms for continuous jump moves seems excessive. That’s probably why the original rules include a rule that prevents capture of more than five pieces during one jump sequence. But this restriction is no longer necessary, as jump freedoms in this implementation have been reduced to five, except during capture. (Capture in the three backward directions is still allowed.) The Soldier can still step in eight directions. 

There is a ZRF by Mats to play Castello.

About Mats, he writes the site Board games, containing great information about old games. He also contributes a lot, at the Zillions database, to make traditional and regional board games available to play. Go check them!