Help a newbie

Hi all,

Never played Catan before . Played base game with the extension at 5p. Seemed like a good majority of the game was rolling, maybe collecting 1 card if lucky, and not having enough to build anything. The game went this was for a long time. Idk how long it took to finish the game but it was at least 2 hours. Did I set the tokens or tiles up wrong? I can't imagine we did this correctly.