With a strategy as grand and expansive as "Crusader Kings 3," it's important to have personal goals along with an endless list of general goals to achieve; for Crusader Kings enthusiast and Reddit member Zak7062, that personal goal came soon after he started playing the game.

His goal was to eat the Pope.

When I saw Zak7062's post on Reddit, it said he had conquered all the holy lands, defeated three crusades, reformed the Norse religion to include cannibalism, and managed to eat the Pope. So I asked for comment.

Zach told me in a Reddit message that he had heard that in "Crusader Kings 3" you could reform the pagans. Zach started the first game of "Crusader Kings 3" in 867 and decided on Halfdan "White Shirt," the yarl of Jorvik, ruler of the Norse.

"I wanted to see what options were available to reform my faith, so I opened the faith screen and checked what doctrines were available. As I scrolled through, one option caught my eye. Ritual Cannibalism"; one of my favorite achievements in CK2 was "Sacred Smoke" - sacrificing the heads of other religions as Norse and Aztec pagans. Then, within a day, I knew what I had to do. It was my destiny.

"I was going to eat the Pope."

Zach, dressed as Halfdan, told me that he had conquered Mercia and Wessex, followed by parts of Ireland and all of Scotland. Halfdan died, but Zach took over the play as his son, Ragnar, and united the British Isles. At that point, the Pope launched a crusade against England, but through strategic alliances ("marrying every woman in the family to a random pagan leader," as Zak put it), Ragnar managed to stave off the crusaders while storing Catholic prisoners in his dungeon.

Zach, who took over as Ragnar's son, Bjorn, decided to burn the Catholics who had generated "hundreds and thousands" of points of faith thanks to the doctrine of human sacrifice. Björn then conquered the Holy Land to reform the Nordic faith and began to develop a special appetite." Stress makes people... I had heard that it made them behave strangely. So, after many, many mental breakdowns and eating because they were sad, they were given the option of demanding "special" food."

After Bjorn became a cannibal and further defended himself against the Crusaders, the Norse sacked Rome and got a special prisoner who wore a very large hat. If they imprisoned someone, they could execute him; if he was a cannibal, they could execute him or eat him.

Zach said: "Pope is back on the menu, boys."

According to Zach, it took him about 100 years in the game and about 15 hours in the real world to accomplish his goal of eating Pope. As the screenshot above shows, beheading and eating Pope Gregorius VI had several effects.

Notably, it lowered his stress by 40 points. (Bjorn's, not the Pope's.) I also like the line, "No one will think of me as a tyrant because I have good reason." I imagine the citizens just nodding their heads when they hear the news that Bjorn cut off the Pope's head and ate it." Yeah, right."

And finally, eating the Pope has a 20% chance of making you sick. Bjorn actually got sick from eating papal meat.

"And he almost died," Zach said. 'But that's the price of salvation.'