Player 1 doesn’t receive a star at the start of the game(at the start of the first round).
If this is implemented for balancing purposes, that doesn’t work for the scenarios where you don’t start on the zone. (In this case most of the time 1st player will arive at his closest zone before 2nd player does to his.)
I would instead give 2nd player as compensation the star straight up and trigger the star zones also at the start of the game.
Giving 2nd player the 1 leadership and star at the start would also make it easier to understand what happened.