Puzzle #88: White to Play; Capture the Stack

Good evening, Takolytes!

I hope everyone had a good week and is settling into their weekend. It's been a busy one here so far, but tomorrow I plan to do nothing but read and play a few games of Tak :)

For those new to my puzzles, I try my best to post one every Saturday night (EST). They are usually one of the following types: Tinue (game ending via forced road), Tinue Avoidance (is there a way out?), Gaelet (game ending via flat count), and Best Move (what would you do, and why?).

The type featured tonight is a new type that I'm trying out called Capture the Stack. The name pretty much says it all:  your goal is to capture a certain stack on the board. This type of puzzle is not a game-ending one, but capturing a valuable stack can certainly tip the game in your favor. So, I thought it would be nice to practice doing just that.

The best way to solve these puzzles is to find a move that forces your opponent into doing something. Then, you use that forced move to force another move, until you have achieved the goal of the puzzle. Sometimes there are more ways than 1 to go about this. While I love seeing the different variations, usually the shortest path to the goal is considered best. The following is a simple example to show how this works.




Please form your answer with PTN or a link to your solution via ptn.ninja. Also, be sure to use the spoiler tag so as not to ruin it for later puzzle solvers.

** I have noticed some people commenting directly to my blog post when answering puzzles. I would kindly ask that you post your answers on the appropriate post on the Reddit page for Tak (r/tak). This will make it easier for me to respond in a timely manner. On that note, I would like to also apologize to those same people for my delayed replies.

The new Reddit spoiler tag is shown below:

>!spoiler!<

Ex:  >!35. a3> 3b2+!<

Okay, since this is my first time trying this type of puzzle, I'm going to do two of them, 1 easy, and 1 harder one.

In the first, your goal is to capture and successfully spread e1:

And... here's the second, where the goals are to capture both e2 and then d4:




Let me know your thoughts on this puzzle type. If it works out, I'll try to find more examples to play around with.

Enjoy!