Daniel (@dungeondive) reviews Tin Realm, Jason Glover’s direct sequel to Tin Helm. Having recovered the three Shards of Brahm, your hero must now cross the overland in seven days to reach the safety of the city of Oakenhelm — a journey that fuses the Tin Helm exploration deck with DustRunner’s path-traversal.
Structure: pick race/class (three new ancestries — dwarf, wood elf, dweller — pair with three new classes — Ranger, Hedge Mage, Sentinel), then move a meeple along a configurable double-sided map path. Each day, work through the exploration deck face-up / face-down card by card, resolving enemies, traps, loot, and special locations (altar, oak warden, wanderer, crossroads, grove, water, labyrinth, campsite). The new wrinkle: every exploration card has terrain icons on its edges, and you build a tableau that must complete two halves of the same terrain icon to move one node on the map. Complete a skull icon by mistake and you lose half your health and slide back three.
All Tin Helm characters, classes, and trappings are compatible, so Tin Helm effectively becomes an expansion to Tin Realm. Caveats: two known card errata (the Raven’s once-per-dungeon-level should read or day; Vile Shores’ random encounter should reference crossroads, not crawl bone), and a print-run UV-coating defect that gives some cards a splotchy iridescent finish — Game Crafter is replacing affected copies but won’t reprint the errata cards.
Direct sequels to micro-games are rare. Does building a follow-up on top of the original system feel like generosity to existing owners, or a tax on newcomers?