Eurogame Design

Is "eurogame" a bad thing? Are you trying to target an american audience/demographic?

My suggestion would be do what you think makes a good game, and so what if it shares similarities with some eurogames. Take what you like about eurogames, and avoid what you dislike.

I personally tend to love and prefer eurogames. But I am also aware of the tropes and such that are a overdone and otherwise bad design.

Here's my personal list of things I like and things I avoid. Not all of these are common to eurogames. Even though I mostly prefer eurogames, when I design, I just focus on designing what I like, and it might come out as a "eurogame" or "ameritrash" game, but either way it's MY type of game:

Things I like:
No player elimination.
No down time.
Lots of player interaction BUT not as much that is direct "ruining" of other players' experience.
Player sense of ownership in what they are "building."
Player sense of accomplishment.
Simple rules, especially with lots of generalities and little to no specifics.

To elaborate on that last one, I mean that if you have several items of your game that could be considered in the same "class" such as resources, weapons, etc, then rules should be applied at a "class" level, not an "item" level. For instance, one of my games involves weapons, divided into two "classes": Hand weapons, and Siege Weapons. I don't have specific rules for each "siege weapon" other than which icon/stat is on each one. Instead I have rules that apply to all "siege weapons", and players simply need to know what each icon/stat is in order to know how a given siege weapon behaves.