Take away the opponent, the clock, and the turns, and a chess piece stops being a soldier. What is left is pure geometry: the rook is a cross of straight lines, the bishop an X of diagonals, the queen both at once. Chess Reactions keeps only that reach - and then hands you a match.
Trigger one piece and it runs the full length of its lines, sweeping up everything standing on them. But nothing you knock over simply disappears. Each captured piece is loaded too, and the capture is its fuse: the bishop you set off clears a diagonal into a waiting rook, the rook fires down its file into a queen, the queen throws two more lines across the board. A dead-still position turns kinetic all at once, straight lines and diagonals detonating off one another.
So the game is not about finding one strong move. It is about reading consequence - seeing, before you commit, which quiet piece is actually the mouth of a chain, and how far the fire will travel once it catches.