Is he looking to design a game for another company to sell or does he want to do it all himself?
If it is the former, you will want to make the best prototype you can. Make it as polished and professional looking with a clear and well-written rulebook. Once you are to that stage, playtest it a lot and make the necessary changes. Finally contact companies like Z-Man games, Rio Grande Games, Mayfair, etc. and get their submission policy. From there, you just send it to them and wait to hear back.
Now if you want to produce your own boardgames, that is a whole different animal. Luckily Asia, China in particular, is full of reasonably priced printers that can handle boards, cards, rules, and boxes.
So what you need to do is create prototypes of your game using whatever is handy. Foamcore, matt board, old CCG cards, pieces stolen from other games, etc. Play the prototype with lots of different groups and see what works and what doesn't. Refine the game and playtest some more. Keep going until the game plays smoothly and does what you would like. Realize that your original idea for the game will probably have changed by now.
Once you have the tested version, then look into what specifications the printers will need. For instance, cards are printed on large sheets with X per sheet, so it makes the most sense to have a multiple of X in your deck. ALso look for ways to lower your costs in pieces. Unique molded plastic pieces would be more expensive than generic plastic pawns.
Once you have all that together, start contacting manufacturing companies and see what their requirements are and get quotes from them. Talk to other small game manufacturers and get a feel for what size of a print run you should have. Realize that if you print 5000 copies of a game, you will have a lot sitting in storage for a while unless you become the "it" game. You are probably looking closer to 1000 units.
Finally do not forget to consider your marketing plan. Once you have these games in your warehouse/garage, how will you let people know about it and motivate them to buy? Will you go to Essen and try to sell there, hold contests to generate interest, send review copies, etc.?
One final option is to go the PDF route. If you can produce the game as a PDF, you can sell it electronically and greatly reduce your costs. Of course you will only get a fraction of the sales you normally would but your margain on each one would be much higher and you would not have to spend all of that production cash upfront.
All of this is off the top of my head, feel free to ask other questions if you want. On our podcast,
On Board Games we have covered desgining and selling games in previous episodes, so you might want to take a listen.
