The design of cooperative games is challenging due to the requirements of cooperation between the players. The major need of the design is to provide an environment that enables players to achieve the game goal in a cooperative fashion. The game premise which is the story behind the game is one of the dramatic elements and impacts the engagement of players. In this paper, we investigate the effect of game premise on the engagement of the players and the cooperation between the players. Hence, to understand this effect, we developed three versions of the Pandemic game with three premises namely positive, negative, and neutral. Using these game versions, we conducted an experiment to see how game premise affects the player experience. The results show that premise can significantly influence the players’ intrinsic motivation, the connection with the game and the cooperation strategies.