New Game Idea--Vampire Themed Area Control/Euro (but mostly Area Control)

Thematically multiple vampires fighting each other seem a bit odd though.

Have you considered alternating players powers?

As in one player plays as a vampire, another as a Frankenstein and his creation(s), another as a team of hunters etc?

While I think you have an interesting premise of vampires fighting for supremacy, I also agree with EIKobold that having other factions would be better. And I think it would give the game a wider appeal.

Vampires vs. werewolves vs. Frankenstein's monsters vs. humans could make for an awesome game as each faction tries to retrieve the legendary artifact.

Each faction could be similar but with a few specific key differences that made them unique. Maybe the humans are easy to kill but they also have powerful weapons. Vampires turn into bats and retreat when they lose instead of dying. Frankenstein's monsters are numerous but not powerful. Werewolves are strong but can only attack in groups. Etc...

Yep, V:TES shows that vampire-on-vampire battle can work really well. I used to play it quite a lot, back in the day.

It was based on White Wolf's World of Darkness roleplaying games (specifically Vampire: The Masquerade) and relied heavily on the clan system from the RPG, where groups of vampires largely aligned along political lines and with different sets of powers within each group. So there was the asymmetric element there: one player has sneaky vampires that keep turning to mist, another has charismatic mind-controlling vampires, and another has bestial vampires who live in the sewers and talk to rats.

If you want to do a contest between different factions of vampires then the asymmetry shown in V:TES is a good way to go, but it may seem derivative of the World of Darkness. Though I think there is probably a heap more vampire literature out there now that does something similar, so the idea is more "spread out" now.

Mind you, I think the concept of having the game between different types of supernatural beasties that others have suggested would probably work better for many players as it is probably easier to categorise vampires, werewolves, zombies, etc. as distinct groups than different vampire factions. I think it depends on whether you want the game to be more political or more overt power struggle.

Good luck with the game.

However, for bats, it seems silly that you wouldn't have lots of them. Bats are cheap, after all. Perhaps as your mobile telepathic link, you have your "children," which explains why there are so few of them. Making an additional one would be a fairly expensive process, and would require a large enough empire in order to support the additional drain on your human chattel (a.k.a. blood supply). The fighting forces could be "the enthralled minions," the humans you have under control.

I think it's not an Euro game.
The phrase contains many connotations, of which this game only really uses worker placement, and not even like traditional worker placement in Euro games.
The rules are actually pretty hard to classify. I would say grid based, objective focused combat with a message relaying twist.
I sort of wonder if the message relaying thing will work well. I can envision deadlocks or standoffs occurring often.

To be honest, I don't really like Euro games all that much. I wonder if there's research on how well games sell/ kickstart vs terms used

I think that fixating on the Euro/Ameritrash false dichotomy is probably not very helpful. There is no reason why a game that is broadly Euro-style in mechanics can't have a strong and tightly integrated theme. It's just that most of the games that we think of as Euro don't.

To take some "standard" characteristics of many (but not all) Euro games, you could easily have a vampire game that:

• Has little direct competition between players.
• Has low levels of chance, and what there is is what is often described as "input randomness".
• Has victory determined by the accumulation of points, which can be gained in different ways.
• Does not have player elimination.

And so on. One of the problems is that definitions of what is a Eurogame vary, and it is a particularly broad bucket, and some folk might have "pasted on theme" as one of their key elements (I don't).

I suspect the OP was just trying to give an indicator of some of the elements being brought into the game (resource management being a common Euro element, for instance) rather than strictly define it.