It is a suggestion of games that you should rate first. Otherwise people would only end up rating the “coolest” games, or the games most posted about, etc. They way everybody gets a piece of the action!

It’s like that to prevent raters from browsing through the games, seeking the ones they like or those that already have lots of votes. Basically the norm is that when you start rating, you should rate that randomized list of 20 games first, to ensure that all games get theoretically equally votes/comments. There’s a big problem with people looking up the games they thought to be cool, and voting only them.

Is it randomized? It seems to be the same list every time I refresh or return. That was what was confusing me… It seemed like a static list.

Seems to be a static list which is random for every Ludum Dare participant.

Once you’ve started filling out all the ratings the list will automatically expand so you will always have 5 unrated games on your own list, as well. So once you’re done with the pre-seeded list you can just continue stepwise down through it.

Ah… As I’m on a Mac and more than half (of my list) is Windows Only, which I can’t legitimately rate (and I don’t want to rate N/A or 1 for all cats), my list didn’t refresh.