I generally stay with the "HCL" for VMware's hosted products (Workstation, Player and Fusion). Seeing as I manage a vSphere environment, Workstation is a more natural fit for my use. The biggest difficulty is generally in building working kernel modules.
That said, I can see your purpose. You'll likely need to skip Xvesa/Xfbdev in favor of Xorg. You'll be needing compiletc and the kernel headers. Seeing as Ubuntu-12.04 is supported by VMware, getting most modules to build for TinyCore on 3.0.21 should just work. I'd completely ignore HGFS as it's fidgety even with fully supported OSs for the host and guest. CIFS/NFS just works. Aside from that, it'll be resolving all of the dependencies of all binaries.
With the installer sizing up at over 350MiB, I'm not sure how worthwhile this may be. You're talking a 50-100 MiB TC plus likely 600MiB for Workstation. If your host has over 3 GiB RAM, you'll really want to use CorePure64 but I'm not sure if all of the dependencies can be resolved.