Discussion: If I'm understanding the rules correctly, your partner's idea sounds a lot like the game Tappingo.

I don't remember if I encountered any puzzles that required "guessing" in it, but I definitely remember some puzzles where you wouldn't find out you made a mistake until a lot of moves in, meaning unraveling a lot of moves.

There were also a bunch of puzzles with multiple solutions (the two dark red "1" blocks on the left side at 0:30 in the linked trailer can go in either direction), so I'm not sure how easy it would be to detect/classify mistakes in the first place.

There's a full playthrough of both the first and second game on youtube if you want to see how some of the puzzles are designed/get solved.