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[jarpenner]

Hi Folks,

My wife and I just purchased the base Dominion game and have a couple of questions that I could not find answers to in the wiki.
1. Do you have to play an action card if it is in your hand during your turn? 

2. Do you have to "Buy" anything during your turn even if you have enough coins to do so? 

3. If I am instructed to trash a card and select a card that is valued 2 coins more than the one I just trashed, can I gain a coin card that fits within the guidelines of the value?

Thank you in advance for any assistance that you  may be able to offer.
Cheers.

John

[silverspawn]

1. Do you have to play an action card if it is in your hand during your turn?

No, playing Action cards is always optional, unless another Action cards explicitly says you have to do it (-> throne room)

2. Do you have to "Buy" anything during your turn even if you have enough coins to do so?

No, buying is optional.

3. If I am instructed to trash a card and select a card that is valued 2 coins more than the one I just trashed, can I gain a coin card that fits within the guidelines of the value?

If by "coin card" you mean "treasure card (the yellow ones)", then yes. You can gain any card type.

[Asper]

I am assuming you are referring to Remodel. When you trash a card with Remodel, you look at the price of the trashed card and then gain another card costing up to two more. Card types are completely ignored for this. You can, for example, trash a Gold which costs 6 $ to gain a Province costing 8 $. Just as well you can trash any card costing 4 $ to gain a Gold. Also the card you gain has to cost "up to two" more, which means that you can also choose to gain a card that costs only one more, the same, or even less than the trashed card. You can even chose to gain another copy of the card you trashed. What you can not do is refuse to gain a card. If there is at least one card in the supply that costs up to two more than the trashed card, you have to gain one of them.

Edit: To clarify this last point, the reason why you can not refuse to gain a card is that when you play a card, you have to follow its instructions and do everything that you can. So if you play Remodel, you have to do all it says. If you don't want to do something a card says, you can refrain from playing it at all. If you can't do something a card says, you can still play the card, but leave out the parts you can't do. So if you played Remodel without another card to trash in hand, you would neither trash nor gain one. And if played Remodel to trash a card with no card in the supply costing up to two more, you would have to leave out the gaining part alone. Mind you, this will not happen under normal circumstances, as three cards costing 2 $ or less are part of every game: Copper, Curse and Estate.

[ConMan]

When you are instructed to "gain a card" without being told where it can come from, you can choose any valid card in the supply. The supply consists of the 10 Kingdom cards chosen for the game, plus all of the base cards - which in the base game are Copper, Silver, Gold, Estate, Duchy, Province and Curse. Roughly speaking, if you can buy it then you can gain it.

(Everything after this is just extra information that you might want to skip over while you're still getting your head around the game.)

Some expansions add additional cards to the supply (for example, Prosperity adds Platinum and Colony) while others introduce cards that are specifically not in the supply, and can only be gained through other means (for example, the Prizes in Cornucopia can only be gained by playing a Tournament). One of the promotional cards - Black Market - specifically gives you a means of buying cards that are not in the supply.

There are also cards that can gain cards from places other than the supply, and there is one such card in the base game - when you trash an opponent's Treasure with a Thief, you may gain that card from the trash.

[Elanchana]

Something that no one's mentioned yet: If you have extra buys and no money left in your turn, you do NOT have to use those buys on copper.

That's something that I've seen trip a lot of people up so I want to spare you the trouble.

[TheOthin]

It's worth bearing in mind that there are sometimes restrictions on card types. For example, Mine is similar to Remodel, but it only trashes and gains Treasures. (Also Mine gains them into your hand directly, which is something I've seen new players miss.) However, Remodel can trash any card type and gain any card type.