I stuck my toe in this particular water for the first time today, with (Wanderland), but have little idea what I am doing. ha ha

The HO part is pretty clear, as is the requirement that I go on "quests" and find stuff and help people ~ sorta like a typical casual game ~ and the "rewards" advance my "Level." I did a few initial quests and collected some Coins and other sorts of points for doing so. After a few minutes, I acquired four new quests to pursue, but nothing else is being triggered now. No new scenes have opened and there are no active tasks in the locations already opened. The game appear to be at a halt.

I am assuming I have to earn my way to higher levels but I cannot find any info within the game world itself (no instructions or Menus) as to what I ought to be doing to make that happen. How do these sorts of games work? Is there a site that explains the genre, in general, for newbies?

Did you check here?
https://www.bigfishgames.com/blog/walkthrough/wanderland-tips-and-tricks/

No, I didn't know there was a WT for these sorts of games. I will take a look this evening. It might clear up a lot of things. Thanks!

It's not really a walkthrough -- more like instructions.
It sounds like you're out of "energy."
Without "energy" you can't do anything.
So you have to wait until it recharges.

Thanks for that. I was going to play it for a while and see if I liked it ~ once I figured out what I was supposed to be doing. ha ha But I still had questions, so I looked up the game on the Game Forums at BF. Right away, I got BF's reminder that the Game Forums were to be abandoned at the end of April 2018 (they all have been locked now), and all you can do is read what was posted previously. You no longer can post any queries nor receive any active feedback from fellow players.

Worse, some of the comments I read alluded to the fact that the game has some bugs that have frustrated plenty of people, sometimes crashing days of progress on a level or a competition, and since the game is no longer being proctored by anyone, you can't look for the glitches to be fixed or your lost progress to be restored by the game support team. In that sense, it essentially is a "dead" game. And there were hints that its programming was not up to date in terms of hardware and software compatibles. Although it sounded like long-time players were deep into it and some planned to keep playing, not many new players were signing up.

Given all that, I unloaded the game and will think about trying one of the other Time Management games out there. Apparently, there are lots of them!

Hope you find something you're interested in.

Thanks, I'm sure I will. It takes a while to sift through so many games out there. If only they are were GOOD, eh? ha ha

I noticed that Steam has quite a few HO type games and some very intereseting puzzle games. I've never considered them before, because I don't like DRM constraints. Are all their games DRM-controlled?

Most require the Steam client and some have 3rd party DRM too.
Here are a couple of lists of "DRM-free" games at Steam that claim not to require the Steam client once they are downloaded
http://steam.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_DRM-free_games
https://store.steampowered.com/curator/7540156-DRM-Free-Games/