Drawing limited tags is a great way harvest an animal of a lifetime on your own. Most of these hunts are managed for the purpose of producing trophy animals. Probably the hardest part of most of these hunts is obtaining the license or tag. Each state has specific systems put into place regarding how hunts are drawn. Most of these are based on a lottery system. If you are lucky enough to get your name drawn out of the big hunting hat, you get the tag.

However in recent years, many states have changed the rules and complicated them a bit. We’ve all heard of people banking “points.” These points give better odds to the point holder, so after building points over several years, one’s chances of drawing the hunt increase. Building points is the most effective way to draw coveted tags. By acquiring points in multiple states, odds are greatly increased.

To make things a little more complicated, these point systems are not the same in every state. Primarily there are two types of systems using points; preference points and bonus points. Preference points give those with the most points preference in drawing the tags. Eventually you can draw these tags by acquiring more points than everyone else. Bonus points are a little bit different because they usually give you one more chance at drawing. In essence, your name is put in the hat more than once according to the number of bonus points you have. A lot of states have a combination of these systems, and allow a certain percentage of tags to be given at random regardless of how many points you have.

To learn more about a specific state’s hunt drawing system, click on the state below.

Currently only states with name labels are available. Other surrounding states are in the works!