I am working on a small project in cocos2d-x. I wanted to send the app to my friend so he can give me a feedback about it. I am developing on visual studio and was really lazy to build an apk so I decided to send it as a desktop app. To do that I needed to find out what cocos2d-x needs to run on another pc. So here is what you need to distribute your cocos2d-x desktop app.
All of them combined are like 15MB, they have x32 and x64 versions which can be installed side by side, so other apps are not affected. Also be sure to send the release version, because if you send the debug version you will also need to send the dll files for debugging.