No such requirement if you get it from F-Droid, which you should.

From my experience, you can just skip it and still play the game.

Most of those Google prompts can just be bypassed by hitting the "back" button (on android, at least).

I dont have google account, but noticed they release apk builds directly on github, side-loaded and running, I may be gone a while...

This is not true. Probably you installed it through the Play store?