by NateStraight
Not really. The two big first turn placements are Occupation and 3 Wood in the 2-player game. If you take one, your opponent will take the other. It's true that the starting player tends to stick with the original starting player for quite a few rounds at the beginning of the game [because it's really costly to take it for the other player when they still need to take other actions to get their game up and running, and minor improvements really aren't typically one of those], but it doesn't seem to me to be a significant advantage at all.If it really concerns you, you could use a variant to handle starting player for 2-player games. My wife and I pass the starting player token after every Harvest [as well as as usual for taking the starting player action], unless the person who had it in the Harvest round took the starting player action on that turn to "secure" it, in which case they get to keep it. We do it because it makes the starting player bounce around a bit more like it does in higher player-count games, but it could also alleviate some of the perceived advantage you note.