I play every entry, every year, in an attempt to give each contestant my feedback via the scoring mechanism. I never write reviews, however, so my method may or may not be helpful-- but it’s only six days into the competition and I’ve already managed to play 33 of 42 titles, so maybe my method has some merits. I do take notes while playing to help me consider my scoring hierarchy, though, so in a way that’s like a mini-review on my part anyway.
The basic thing to be aware of is: only rarely are IF Comp games substantial enough for the “two hour” rule to be relevant. I only played one title so far this year that required two hours, and last year there was only one such entry as well. I try to explore every entry to some form of gameplay resolution unless a) it’s horrible busted junk that just doesn’t work in technical terms (I’m scoring 7 titles as ‘ones’ so far for this very reason), or b) I have some emotional response to the title that makes me so very angry I desist for the sake of my blood pressure. Reaching a gameplay resolution of some kind rarely requires more than 30-60 minutes. The more important thing to keep in mind is that half the entries are CYOAs, and those rarely take more than 10-15 to resolve (even at fifteen minutes, that’s four games an hour if you have uninterrupted time).
What I do, then, is start with all the CYOAs. Since these only take a few minutes each, one can play through half or more of the whole competition in a day or two. Then I take a look at the file sizes and format of the remaining games-- I play the z8s and smaller games (based on filesize) first, and only near the end do I begin to explore the big glulxe (or tads, if there are any) games. Also, when I start playing something I can usually tell in the first ten minutes or so if it’s going to be a substantial, lengthy gameplay experience. If I don’t have time or I’m not in the mood after ten minutes, I just stop and save it for some other time.
The virtue of this approach is, you allow yourself to develop a habit of how much time you can spend and how much time you want to spend each day exploring the entries. You’re not committing yourself to any unforseen coincidences, such as if you say “I’m going to review two games per day” and on a given day you happen to pick two huge games that will require two hours of playing plus who knows how long to review-- but you haven’t allowed yourself time, because by coincidence for the previous four days you picked CYOAs and wrapped up both gameplay and reviews in 90 minutes, and you were getting used to that rate.
In other words, play the shortest games first-- CYOAs, then parser games with small file sizes. This will get you in the habit of playing daily, and will also speed you through the entries. By the time you get over thirty games played (out of 42 this year), you’ll likely be able to finish them all just by inertia. As you noted, “warming up” is the key to the whole thing in my opinion.