It has the related feature that some rows have only 8 cells (which can be a potential problem, too).
I remember having seen this variant (in french magazine, very long time ago) with rule that each 8-cells rows was completed by the touching single cell.
The primrose sudoku (this geometry:
http://sudokuvariante.blogspot.com/2016 ... udoku.html) has the same property of having some cells belonging to only one generalised row (more than one cell per region: there are 9 such cells for only 5 regions), but in counterpart, there is a - perhaps not well-known - technique to notice that these cells form an extra-region. Here all rows have digits from 1 to 9, in contrary to star sudoku.