After 3 hours, I have hit a wall because I'm running 64 bit (like, you know, the whole rest of the world) and libtcod won't compile.
I assume there would be an option with your compiler to do a 32-bit build. Which will run on a 64 bit OS.
A large part of the problems people have in compiling libtcod are mingw-related. It's gotten to the point where we have ditched mingw for libtcod 1.6, and only support Visual Studio which is free.
You can just get the source for libtcod 1.6 from bitbucket, install Visual Studio 2015 community edition, open the solution and with a few minor steps it should just build (getting SDL2 in place). Or you can after installing VS, not open the solution and run 'build.bat' which should fetch the dependencies (SDL2) and do 32 bit and 64 bit builds. Then you can open Visual Studio if you want and it will just work.
However, the tutorial needs to be updated for libtcod 1.6, which hasn't happened. So at that point, anyone doing the tutorial needs to be able to master their own destiny to some limited extent.